Profrektius on 11 April 2016
UPDATE TO SCORING (starting May): So there will be a slight change in how the metascore is calculated for multiplatform games. For March and April it used to be simply the average of all version metascores, but starting with May it will be a proportionally weighed average depending on the number of reviews.
To illustrate the changes, I'll use Dying Light: The Following as an example.
- Dying Light: The Following, PC, 79 metascore, 32 reviews
- Dying Light: The Following, PS4, 78 metascore, 23 reviews
- Dying Light: The Following, Xbox One, 86 metascore, 7 reviews
With the simple method of taking the average it would be (79+78+86)/3 = 81
In this case the number of reviews on each platform does not matter.
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With the proportionally weighted average it would be (79*32+78*23+86*7)/(32+23+7) ~ 79.4 ~ 79
If someone did not follow the math, it is simply first multiplying the metascore by the number of reviews on each platform and adding them together. Then dividing by the total number of reviews on all platforms. This method places less weight on the outlier version that had significantly less reviews.
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In most cases this will not make much of a difference, but occasionally it might drag the score closer to the version with the most reviews. However the difference between these two methods would mostly be either no differnce or a difference of 1 point, with already 2 point difference as above being less common.
This method will be able to more accurately represent the average opinion across all critics.
