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IGN: Is Metacritic Ruining The Games Industry?

Ruining? Cut the hyperbolic shit.

I do think however that it is affecting it negatively, like with developers seemingly adding unneeded multiplayer modes that nobody is going to fucking play just to get an added blurb in a review or not get docked points for not having "replay value".

Personally, metacritic for games is fucking useless to me with video game reviewers and their 20 and sometimes 100-point reviews, and let's not mention how most of them don't score anything below 7. I believe if these people all united and collectively adopted a five-point scale things would be better. They definitely would be more hard-pressed to give games a near-perfect score of five points, and they'd probably be more willing to give more games a 3/5 or less.
 
Team Vernia said:
Rotten Tomatoes style needs to happen ASAP. Those numbers mean nothing with different review scales messing things up. 2.5 of 5 should equal 5 out of 10... but it never does.
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I agree, the aggregate collected at rotten tomatoes does movies more justice and the average metacrtic gives to games. It also doesn't help when the really big sites like IGN have overtly questionable reviews... which gives them no business in questioning smaller sites with "non-professional" journalists.
 
jett said:
Ruining? Cut the hyperbolic shit.

I do think however that it is affecting it negatively, like with developers seemingly adding unneeded multiplayer modes that nobody is going to fucking play just to get an added blurb in a review or not get docked points for not having "replay value".

Personally, metacritic for games is fucking useless to me with video game reviewers and their 20 and sometimes 100-point reviews, and let's not mention how most of them don't score anything below 7. I believe if these people all united and collectively adopted a five-point scale things would be better. They definitely would be more hard-pressed to give games a near-perfect score of five points, and they'd probably be more willing to give more games a 3/5 or less.
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They add multiplayer because they hope it will keep people from trading it in to gamestop for just a few weeks longer. If the publisher can minimize used sales of a game for the first few months, it helps their bottom line immensely. It has zero to do with reviews, and most games' multiplayer modes don't have much bearing on the review or the score.
 
AOC83 said:
This.

Most of them couldn´t do a halfway impartial review if their life depended on it.
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Blame the reviewers? If anything review scores are TOO HIGH on average going by the wording on the scales.

If anything bad reviewers are helping metacritic based bonuses happen.
 
Yoda said:
I agree, the aggregate collected at rotten tomatoes does movies more justice and the average metacrtic gives to games. It also doesn't help when the really big sites like IGN have overtly questionable reviews... which gives them no business in questioning smaller sites with "non-professional" journalists.
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As Michael Jackson once said;

If You Wanna Make The World
A Better Place
Take A Look At Yourself, And
Then Make A Change
Na Na Na, Na Na Na, Na Na,
Na Nah
 
I'm surprised most people care. But then I was surprised Publishers use it to determine if developers deserve a bonus.
 
LuchaShaq said:
Blame the reviewers? If anything review scores are TOO HIGH on average going by the wording on the scales.

If anything bad reviewers are helping metacritic based bonuses happen.
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Of course they are too high. I´m not saying games like Uncharted (i actually like the series very much), Mass Effect, Halo etc. are not pretty good, but giving them a rating of 94 or 95 or even higher is absolutely ridiculous. That´s close to a perfect game and they are very far from that.
 
GuardianE said:
I agree that the emphasis placed on Metacritic by publishers is a fundamentally flawed metric.
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They should use the GAF Backlash Index instead.

The developer bonus is basically $100 per day until the first "LTTP <gamename> fucking sucks!!11!" thread emerges.
 
Why is Metacritic used?

Pretty simple. Most industries have certain quantifiable metrics which can be used to create a regression forecasting model.

Games, much like movie box office, is incredibly difficult to predict because there are very few variables that can be relied upon to predict sales.

Metacritic, believe it or not, is one of the few variables (used in combination with platform, genre and geography) that actually has a decent correlation to sales and can therefore be used to forecast what a game might sell, and, therefore, inform the budgeting process to create that game. The correlation isn't great, r-squared of .2-.3, but there it is.

So yeah, executives and the industry cares. And sure, there are outliers to everything, and nothing is at all perfect about these kinds of models, but aggregated quality scores do count and are important.
 
This article is hilarious as it's blaming Metacritic for the ratings rather than blaming the reviewers themselves for inflating scores. People should be questioning if rating games on a 10 point or 100 point or whatever over 9000 point scale is useful any more. This rating system is the one that ironically IGN promotes yet dares to write. Seems rather than blaming Metacritic, the writer should blame a company's culture is blatantly wrong in giving promotions according to scores.

Metacritic is just an information messenger/aggregator. They don't write reviews! The implied message is how silly the rating system the gaming industry is. This is like blaming Google for making the Internet easy to find information rather than publishing information to the "old tried and true" paper and index cards without using computers.

Way to miss the mark IGN. Just as bad as politics.
 
Sorry IGN that they don't sell review scores. IGN is ruining the gaming industry, and will be put out of business by companies like Metacritic. Your shit articles like this one won't be missed!
 
I think it's weird that the most important point in that whole article isn't even bolded in the OP, so I'll reiterate.

You canÂ’t average out opinions


/thread
 
CosmicQueso said:
You can average any series of numbers. And if opinions are assigned numbers, then guess what...
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The opinions aren't assigned numbers, the review "score" is. The opinions are all of those words associated with the review that people seem to completely ignore when looking at a site like metacritic.
 
What's next?

IGN - Are Amazon user review scores ruining the industry?

"Users should not be allowed to review games as they don't hold any credentials in video game reviewing. Amazon should not let users review products because they affect sales."

Goldenroad said:
I think it's weird that the most important point in that whole article isn't even bolded in the OP, so I'll reiterate.

You can&#8217;t average out opinions


/thread
Click to expand...


Yeah you can. Is the overall consensus good or bad? You either like it or not like it.

It's whether thinking a higher numeric score means that a game is worthy of that value. That's where the flaws are for corporations who credit money in that respect. Something is wrong with that toxic culture in a work environment.
 
Can someone please explain the general hatred towards IGN? I realize they have the biggest site, and some would say the the quality of their articles, generally, doesn't equate to the 'justification' for their success. But trying to get my head around the "IGN is already destroying the games industry" meme and similar statements.
 
claviertekky said:
What's next?

IGN - Are Amazon user review scores ruining the industry?

"Users should not be allowed to review games as they don't hold any credentials in video game reviewing. Amazon should not let users review products because they affect sales."
Click to expand...

You don't see publishers basing financing and deals on Amazon user scores. Obsidian did not get royalties from Fallout: New Vegas because their game got an aggregated score of 84 instead of 85 or higher. They had to fire people because of this.
 
Rapstah said:
You don't see publishers basing financing and deals on Amazon user scores. Obsidian did not get royalties from Fallout: New Vegas because their game got an aggregated score of 84 instead of 85 or higher. They had to fire people because of this. See, one of these is bad.
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Rather than blame metacritic, blame the company's culture.
 
Bgamer90 said:
Many of the points brought out about metacritic scores could be said about IGN scores.
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WORD! And like IGN scores for games are done by one person, so only one person's opinion is taken to account for the review of the game....so IGN is actually worse than Metacritic according to IGN's own logic.

And not to add the many questionable reviews for high profile games on IGN.


What a hypocritical piece of ____ IGN is, well the author of that article I mean.
 
claviertekky said:
Yeah you can. Is the overall consensus good or bad? You either like it or not like it.
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Like or don't like is one opinion. If all reviews consisted of 3 to 5 words I would agree with you, but since reviews consist of multiple opinions, it's impossible to do. For example, Giant Bomb may have opinions on on a game that the music is similar to Prince and P-funk and think that is pretty cool, meanwhile Joystiq may say the camera for the same game makes them feel a little nauseous and they aren't crazy about that part of the game.

How do you average out those opinions and come up with a numerical value to attach to them? You can't. Reviews aren't just "I like this" or "I don't like this"...and that's what metacritic tries, and fails miserably, at turning them into.
 
claviertekky said:
Rather than blame metacritic, blame the company's culture.
Click to expand...

That seems to be half of what the article is doing. Since the other half (basic flaws to aggregation of scores) can't be ruining the games industry directly I don't see how that applies to any other part of it.
 
Rapstah said:
You don't see publishers basing financing and deals on Amazon user scores. Obsidian did not get royalties from Fallout: New Vegas because their game got an aggregated score of 84 instead of 85 or higher. They had to fire people because of this.
Click to expand...

But without Metacritic, there would have been some other quality or performance based bonus that they also could have whiffed by a small percentage. Imagine their bonus was tied to shipping 4.5 million units and they shipped 4.49 million? In fact, I'd say that's even more unfair because developers have less to do with end sales than they do with end reviews or end quality (although obviously a publisher has an important role in all three)

Or they commissioned a focus group, and they got a bonus based on an aggregate focus group score of 8.0 and they got a 7.9?
 
Goldenroad said:
Like or don't like is one opinion. If all reviews consisted of 3 to 5 words I would agree with you, but since reviews consist of multiple opinions, it's impossible to do. For example, Giant Bomb may have opinions on on a game that the music is similar to Prince and P-funk and think that is pretty cool, meanwhile Joystiq may say the camera for the same game makes them feel a little nauseous and they aren't crazy about that part of the game.

How do you average out those opinions and come up with a numerical value to attach to them? You can't. Reviews aren't just "I like this" or "I don't like this"...and that's what metacritic tries, and fails miserably, at turning them into.
Click to expand...
Something good that Metacritic does is put all the reviews in one place. I can click and read why a reviewer gave a score as such and make my decisions then. You can grasp a plethora of opinions on the game without individually jumping to each site to find review scores.

If you use Metacritic just for e-peen points solely on numbers, then you're doing it wrong. I don't see how you can blame Metacritic in this aspect. The corporations think this numeric value is a good way to judge performance, and this is where the problem lies in company culture management, not the website. The website is just a messenger.

-------

For a while, there was a meme (now bannable) on this forum saying, "So basically, this action game is worse than <insert WiiFit, sports game>" based purely on score. That's what some companies are doing.
 
Stumpokapow said:
But without Metacritic, there would have been some other quality or performance based bonus that they also could have whiffed by a small percentage. Imagine their bonus was tied to shipping 4.5 million units and they shipped 4.49 million? In fact, I'd say that's even more unfair because developers have less to do with end sales than they do with end reviews or end quality (although obviously a publisher has an important role in all three)

Or they commissioned a focus group, and they got a bonus based on an aggregate focus group score of 8.0 and they got a 7.9?
Click to expand...

In those cases, the royalties would have been for all intents and purposes out of the hands of reviewers and then this article would have had no point. As is, aren't they in their full right to complain about the system if it involves them?
 
If the industry stops putting such importance on metacritic there wouldn't be a problem. It's the industry creating the reliance so they could use it as another free promotion tool.

I have never visited the site before so it's not that important.
 
I remember Jeremy Parish recently answered a question I asked him about what he thinks of how Metacritic parses 1Up's letter grades.

He answered: They're awful. They do a disservice to us, to readers, and to developers.

Look at Fallout New Vegas for a perfect example. 1Up gave F:NV a B grade. To Metacritic, that's apparently a 75.
 
All i have to say is that after GTA IV i stopped listening to the likes of Metacritic or any scores. All i do to determine if a game is good or not is watching GAFs reaction, possibly play a demo of it and watch a classic game room hd review if there is one, if not then a giantbomb quick look or some youtube let's play videos.
 
If IGN really wanted to take a stand against Metacritic, they would stop having their review scores be included in the MC aggregate. (And perhaps even stop scoring their reviews altogether.) The chances of IGN actually taking that step? Zero.
 
Zaventem said:
I don't see why metacritic is to blame, score inflation from critics is.It's what caused the "8 and below is shit" in the video game world and it's here to stay forever.
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score inflation is a myth based on some imagined time period when reviewers used the whole review score scale to describe the same quality of game that now exclusively occupies the 75+ range.

as for metacritic in general...

budweiser and ineffective birth control => sheep consumer => game mags who gear their reviews towards sheep => sheep games dominate metacritic => non-sheep developers bemoan metacritic on way to scrap-pile => metacritic awards first 100% to Counting of Sheep: Modern Snorefare => GAF complains, even though most of them bought it => bobby kotick profits
 
The problem with video game reviews is that they are scored at all. This is not a problem unique to video games, it's a problem with plenty of mainstream music and movie reviews as well.

If video games want to be taken seriously as a cultural and artistic medium then the scores need to go away. Serious literature reviews are not scored, proper film reviews are not scored, non-fiction book reviews are not scored. A number cannot accurately describe or define a work of fiction and it's stupid to pretend that it can.

The score also becomes a crutch that allows the articles themselves to be absolutely terrible. IGN is one of the main perpetrators of terribly written and pointless review text. Greg Miller should not be allowed to write anything professionally, let alone be charged with giving a thoughtful opinion on something.

Games reviews are terrible because we allow them to be terrible, and as long as people care more about the score at the end of the review than the text itself not only will reviews continue to be awful, the medium will continue to fail to meet its potential for artistic expression.
 
Seance said:
Nothing against MC. It's the publishers that pay out bonus' based on score that is hurting the industry.
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Publishers that hold aside some of the allocated dev budget against Metacritic scores are worse. Effectively like developing with a gun to your head.
 
Metacritic has never influenced my purchase but I undestand there are gamers that look to it and probably will never purchase games that drop below 90 which is a real shame. When the whole industry is run by the mainstream audience a site like metacritic will prevent developers from broadening, I say burn it down to the ground,
 
I would say GameRankings > Metacritic, but that's just my opinion.

Does anyone know the aggregate user review scores of those respective websites?
 
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