Is Metacritic damaging the video game industry?

[the_tyrant]

http://ca.ign.com/articles/2012/07/16/is-metacritic-ruining-the-games-industry


Let’s say there’s a new film out in a few weeks that was filmed under the following unusual contractual condition: if the Rotten Tomatoes rating isn’t above 80% after a week or two, the writer and director don’t get paid royalties. Or say a new band signs to a record label, and the label refuses to pay a signing bonus unless their first album gets 5 stars in NME, the Guardian and Kerrang as well as an 85+ on Pitchfork (http://pitchfork.com/).
Imagine how patently absurd this would be – and then reflect that this is exactly the situation that some game developers find themselves in. Metacritic, the review aggregator that collects scores from major sites, newspapers and magazines and swirls them together with blogs and smaller outlets to create an average number and give you an at-a-glance assessment, has become such a powerful force in the games industry that it doesn’t just impact the nature of games reviews, it directly influences development and marketing, as well as how developers are paid.


I fully agree, this has to stop.

Games nowadays come in 2 types, those that never change, afraid to alienate loyal fans (Dynasty Warriors, I am looking at you), games that keep trying to appeal to everyone (Splinter Cell Conviction, Ghost Recon Future Soldier), and by extension games that get dumbed down too much (Jagged Alliance: Back in action anyone?)

This is ridiculous, games shouldn't try to appeal to everyone (or should I say, every reviewer out there). They should have a target market, and try to appeal to that

[Gargamel]

Target audiences don't create the $ broad appeal games do.

That said, I prefer niche games. Subsims, football manager, etc.

[Stealhead]

I agree with Gargamel no gaming company not the larger ones at least are going to focus much on niche games they are going to make any game as appealing as possible to the largest audience their purpose is to make profits.The smaller devs can afford to focus on niche markets.

Not much is going to change that.Notice how many games these days try to be more like a movie than a game? Notice how gaming companies spend much time hyping their products?They want people to pre-order they get their money who cares if most people dislike the game if they get a large enough number to pre-order then they get the profits that they need.


I am not afraid to say that by and large games are not as good as they where in the old day.I think part of this is because in the old day gaming and PC gaming was a niche market as gaming became more and more main stream it has also become more and more shallow generally speaking.Just like main stream movies most are a bit shallow.

Ten years ago if they had the technology available today they would have been selling much better games I have no doubt.Today even the "good" games still fell rushed and incomplete.

For this reason I tend to favor the smaller gaming companies and more niche games like war games The Operational Art of War III and War in the Pacific:AE are two good examples, sims DCS line shines and RPGs Legend of Grimrock and RPGs by Spiderweb.The devs of these games do a really good job making their game what players want and also supporting their games and in a fair none money grabby manner.

Metacritic is just a wheel in the cog of what is crappy about the gaming industry.I do like that many people have youtube channels where they try out games and rate them some of these are fairly well done and objective.

Look at EA with Battlefield 3 spamming their adds all over the web "buy the rip off premium pack you sucker pay $60.00 more dollars for even more smelly crap."

Meta is not trust worthy because it gathers data from magazines and sites who of course have mainly game companies as advertisers which means they are not likely to say anything about a game made by a company that purchased a large add the only time you these clowns actually say a game is crap is when it is some small developer that dose not advertise much.

[Krauter]

I agree agree whole heartedly with you Steelhead. The only thing that I would differ a little bit on is about the youtube channel guys. Check out Yogscast and how it's changed over time. I find that more and more they're going from two guys enjoying themselves to just making videos to please people.

I'd highly recommend checking out TotalHalibuts WTF is... series. Does a decent first look at a few games, though many of his reviews enter in the negative (ahem.. all of them do if I'm not mistaken). Still he offers generally unbiased impressions.

[Hottentot]

I am not afraid to say that by and large games are not as good as they where in the old day.I think part of this is because in the old day gaming and PC gaming was a niche market as gaming became more and more main stream it has also become more and more shallow generally speaking.Just like main stream movies most are a bit shallow.

While on the other hand some older games had "challenge" that wasn't at all "challenge" but mere annoyance in most cases. When Oblivion came out, there was an outrage: quest markers and fast travel! Preposterous! In Morrowind we went from place to place by slowly walking or levitating (if there wasn't a strider going somewhere within 1,000 miles radius of the place we wanted to go, in which case we walked only half of that), and followed vague directions that we couldn't ask anyone ever to specify.

People back then called that "shallow". I called that an improvement. Likewise when Mass Effect 2 came out, it was "dumbed down" because it didn't have 1,000,000 useless weapons and upgrades that you'd never use and would finally just end up converting to Omnigel to make space in inventory for [ta-ra-ra-raa]: more useless stuff. Fallout 3 was shallow and dumbed down because of time slowing V.A.T.S. system. It was so much better when people just stood around in one place and shot each other until one of them died.

I called Crusader Kings 2 dumbed down and shallow when playing it for the first time, having spent countless (no pun intended) of hours playing CK 1. After finishing my first game, I was forced to ask: "Why didn't they think of this in CK 1 already?!"

I have found out that the less I have time to play, the less I have patience for lots of stuff that I used to find bearable in the older games. I still have lots of old games and am a frequent customer of GOG, but lots of things in the games I used to love make me scratch my head these days. Things that are not dependent so much on the level of technology, but simply the design choices that make no sense. I have found out that I'd rather spend my spare hour or two every now and then with the shallow and dumbed down modern games than start a deeper old game, which I simply don't have time to finish and will just get frustrated with it.

If I have a holiday, then I will consider it, but even in that case I'd rather install a good, by definition complicated and deep sim like Falcon and spend my time with learning it (again) instead of fighting with senseless design that is supposed to make the game "deeper and more challenging". That's what many older games are for me these days.

[Skybird]

Magazine'S ratings are according to the bias of the author (did he loike it or not), the dependence on advert fees and access to previews, exlcusive material and so on, and - hopefully - to some part on objectiuve uqlaities or lack of: how buggy or stabile is the game, how good works the interface and steering, etc.

Metacritic does not form a meta-analysis like one knows in science, because it does not depend on studies and experimental research, but on material that is highly subjective. It is opinion only.

And as siuch the reading audience should understand it. If it does not, and takes it as the holy gospel that they let decide over what they buy and what not (niche games for example), then the problem lies with the audience.

From a POV by the game industry, they certainly do not want somebody like metacritic giving a bad mean score collected by the many individual magazine scores. They want shine and glory, to boost their sales. Critics thus are only welcomed when they rate five stars, not just one.

Leave metacritic as what it is, but start spreading the word to the kids what it really means, how these scores get formed up. Every statsic anylyst knows that just giveing an averga emean score is totally useless, that you have to give a minimum of additonal despropctive statics data as well: standard variance, spread, skewness of distribution, and kurtosis, and the like. That'S why Metacritic scores imo are not meaningful only when they give extremely, very extremely low or high scores. For the majority of scores ranging from medium-low to medium-high that maybe 80 or 90% of games may acchieve (my guess), they are pretty much useless.

an audience knowing this will be less vulnerable to basing its decisions pro or contra a buy on such summarised average scores.

So leave metacritics as it is - the gaming industry already has ways and tools enough and spreads stupid propaganda sufficiently to see its commercial interest being pushed. If then the commercial success still does not come - maybe they have done somethign wrong with the game indeed...?

[Dowly]

I'd highly recommend checking out TotalHalibuts WTF is... series. Does a decent first look at a few games, though many of his reviews enter in the negative (ahem.. all of them do if I'm not mistaken). Still he offers generally unbiased impressions.

Not nearly all of them are negative.