Green=Good, Red=Bad, Orange/amber=probably bad.

No, metacritic's orange review score doesn't actually mean probably bad. But that's the message it conveys. Orange is like red, red is bad therefore orange is a psychological message which means likely to be bad so don't buy. And the bar for organge is set way too high. If your metascore is 74 you're orange, and chances are your game will sell like crap, especially if it's a new IP.

This is bad for gaming. A game that reviews above 7/10 on average should succeed and sell well enough (as long as a ridiculous amount wasn't spent on the game) to profit and for the developer to either go on to make more new games, or make a few sequels and hopefully make even better games. But because metacritic makes a 74 game an orange (which makes it the same colour category as a 50 meta game) it is very difficult for a new IP that is good, but not OMG teh best, to do well enough to at least make a return for the publisher and to encourage experimentation.

On Metacritic, movies that get a 60 metascore earn a green square. Why is there such a huge discrepancy? We do know that game reviewers have historicaly lacked a bit of discernment and have tended to give higher scores to games than they perhaps deserve. But is that the case any more? It seems game reviewers have recently started making beter use of the full 10 point spread (or at least the points above 5). So games that reviewers give 7/10 and even 6.5/10 are still mostly liked by the reviewer and are worth looking at. So if reviewers have started spreading out their scores more then  metacritic should widen the range of scores that get a green square (to say 65) and thereby give new IP a better chance of success.

Or perhaps have 4 colours. If the 60-74 range was to have maybe soething like a turquoise colour (i.e. like green, but not green but not anything like red) then psychologically people would be more inclined to think the 60-74 games might be worth trying out.

What do you reckon, do you reckon orange is offputting to people who go to metacritic and they are less likely to buy a game that is actually good, but comes in at below 75? I don't buy the line that a lot of people use to say that Metascore is stupid and people are stupid for basing buying decisions on metascore. It might be true of course, but I think meta sore does affect sales potential for a game. And I think the colour code affects the games that sit in theat upper middle score range.

An interesting point, no doubt it does have an effect and should probably be changed, yellow would make more sense.

Games with average scores of 75 or less sold like crap before Metacritic was even a thing, so I'm not sure Metacritic is a problem. There's always Gamerankings which does the same thing without colors.

Movies have a much wider range of scores that are "watchable". A lot of mass market movies get ~60 from critics, and conversely a lot of movies that get high critic ratings are niche.

I think Metacritic chose that scale because game reviewers tend to score 90% of games in the 6-10 range. Many of them with hilariously pointless decimal systems that wouldn't need to exists if they used the 1-10 scale...

But this makes me think that, perhaps if Metacritic did lower the threshold for "green" titles, it might work the opposite way and influence reviewers to start having more helpful scoring systems.

If the internet weren't so anal about scores...

People rely too much on reviews these days instead of thinking for themselves.

Whoa whao hold the phone. Might want to recheck your facts op. Have you actually bothered to look at the actual psychological implications of colours? Red for instance does not mean "bad" http://www.colour-affects.co.uk/psychological-properties-of-colours Seriously you got it all wrong for the colours.

Red being "bad" stems from technology using it because it is easily noticable... which is why it is used to highlight danger. Danger is bad therefore red is bad.

Perhaps the "psychology" term is more of the problem... the website you linked to is talking about the psychology of colour on it's own (ie if you are sat in a red walled room) In everyday life though, at least in the Western world, bright red is associated with danger. (which also leads on to it meaning "stop")

So use gamerankings instead? Metacritic's critic selection has always been a bit off.

while i can see the point, sometimes it is a useful tool when 90% of game "journalists" give a game high marks when it is a piece of shit. example, Rome total war 2.