A lot of people just pirated the game instead. If someone actually played the game before they rated it on the basis of one factor (servers), presumably that's exactly what they did. I'm guessing there weren't too many user reviews that read "I can't believe I paid $60 for a game that doesn't even support dedicated servers!" I'd wager to say there were none.

Plenty of people played the game (and are still playing the game) but never paid for it. But in this instance, the pirates were vastly outnumbered by the mass of ordinary gamers who actually buy their games because they simply don't game enough to get into the world of pirated games.

And I completely agree; user review scores on Metacritic generally don't add up to anything.

As for Alan Wake on PC, I'd still rather play a DX11 enabled version of the game playing at 1920x1080 with full effects enabled. I just don't know if I'd wait say... a year before playing the game, or even six months.

Plus I'm pretty sure that as of now the official word from Remedy is "there is no PC version of Alan Wake" which may well just mean it won't be announced until after the Xbox has enjoyed the benefits of its "exclusive" debut sales.

Shaaaadaup. Alan Wake doesn't scare anybody, not the PS3 or the fanboys...and most likely not even the people playing the game. Let the haters hate and if the game turns out to be good, you can make another thread and laugh at them.

Now don't you see why there is a need to get Goes-to-11 reviews into Metacritic?  They help counter nonsense like this.  Since people only care about what the score is, and not the content, what Goes-to-11 gives the game goes far to counter this... and no one will actually need to read anything else.

Probably all of Sony's staff voted ;)

Right on metacritic's page it says...

"[Note: Ignore the user vote tally above. They are very old votes from people who have not played the game. They will be zero'd out before the game is released.] Alan Wake is a psychological action thriller, a unique new take in the world of ..."

A bunch of 11 ratings wouldn't offset a bunch of 1 ratings unless Metacritic didn't use averages and instead threw out a 1 for every 11 scored via user rating.

I'm not even sure why anyone is even validating these scores given by people who haven't even played the final version of the game at all much less finished it regardless of whatever false claims they make on their "reviews."

All they're doing is completely invalidating ALL user scores.

Or maybe because it's obvious that nobody's played it, you can stop posting this nonsense because it's a 360 exclusive.

Funny how you said this about my post when you could just have easily said it about the OP... yeah.. funny..

fanboys be scared. Alan Wake will be the best game this year.

Well if you check out the summary for the game on the Metacritic page you'll see this:

Summary

[Note: Ignore the user vote tally above. They are very old votes from people who have not played the game. They will be zero'd out before the game is released.]

Cheers for clearing that up. :)