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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Is METACRITIC bad for the Gaming Industry ?

 

Does Metacritic affect your purchase of a game ?

Yes 38 34.86%
 
No 30 27.52%
 
Never 11 10.09%
 
Maybe just a little 30 27.52%
 
Total:109
Jon-Erich said:
Metacritic is terrible for the industry and here's why.

- Publishers look at Metacritic a lot and base a game's performance (quality performance) on meeting a specific Metacritic score. If it doesn't meet that score, this could result in development teams losing their jobs, especially if the game does fall below sales sales expectations.

- Dumbasses like the ones who work Square-Enix actually make make sales projections based on Metacritic scores while forgetting the GOTY games have bombed in the past.

- Metacritic rates a score purely on math and logical means of rating a score rather than rating what a score means on an emotional or feeling-based level. A perfect example is X-Play. Years ago, Adam Sessler complained that Metacritic considered a 3/5 to be equalled to a 60% rating. The problem was Sessler felt that a 3/5 should be considered higher since X-Play only has five ratings to give.

- Ratings are hype and with honesty, it only takes a couple of bad ratings to lower a game's overall rating.

- Many people actually do base their purchasing decisions on Metacritic scores.

- Most people seem to forget the something in the 50 range in an average score. For some reason, most people have come to believe that if some goes below an 80, it's not worth their time.

I can go on and on, but I think it's easy to conclude that Metacritic has done more bad than good to the industry.


Some really valid points in this post



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People place way too much emphasis on metacritic. Lollipop Chainsaw got a pretty mediocre score, yet that was one of my favorite games this gen.



Sigs are dumb. And so are you!

the bad thing is how people interpret the scores...

most people think mixed review games (around 60) is already bad even though they mention it is mixed.

they only think it has to be around high 80+ to 90s to be good



 

aikohualda said:
the bad thing is how people interpret the scores...

most people think mixed review games (around 60) is already bad even though they mention it is mixed.

they only think it has to be around high 80+ to 90s to be good


Yes, allot of gamers think like this.



It's hard to say. I believe it helps in some ways, but hurts in other. The big problem is that review scores at this point are almost arbitrary. Many times the score in no way reflects the comments. Almost like different people wrote the review and rated the game.



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naruball said:

The solution is never, ever that simple. DMC is a prime example of that. Great game accoording to game reviewers and quite a few people who actually played it and bad sales to the point that we won't see a sequel (as in DMC 2). 

I addressed that in my post. 

And yes, of course I know making a good game isn't "simple." However, the idea of making a good game is simple. This is what I was getting at. There are some games that are clearly bad on their merits, others can be made good. Developers just need to want it enough. However, some developers settle because it's all in the word of how much their game will earn, not it's actual worth.

I would also like to point out that if reviewers think it's bad, it doesn't mean the end of the world. The market can respond well to it. This has happened many times before. Especially in some movies case. This whole argument about Metacritic becoming an issue hardly applies to a large portion of the greater market for video games. (Meaning, the people who don't check these reviews. (Meaning a larger portion of people.))



So its looking like Amazon just added a Metacritic option to their site.