Metacritic: 2009 multiplat games better on Playstation 3

Link: http://www.smgamers.com/?p=470

Metacritic: 2009 multiplat games better on Playstation 3

By Kyle Kulyk    

In this present gaming age where developers do not have the luxury of a ready audience of  well in excess of 100 million Playstation 2 owners and with the added developmental costs associated with videogames for this generation, many developers have turned to releasing their titles on multiple gaming consoles to expand their audience.   While this ultimately enriches the gaming landscape as more gamers are able to play the latest titles it has also created a riff within the gaming community, a riff that centers around debate regarding the quality of multiconsole releases on Sony’s Playstation 3 versus Microsoft’s older Xbox 360.

At the time of it’s North American and Japanese launch in the winter of 2006 (and subsequently it’s worldwide launch in March of 2007), PS3 multiplatform titles came under close scrutiny from the gaming community who were anticipating the multiplats to take advantage of the PS3’s unique architecture and produce a higher quality multiconsole release much like the more powerful original Xbox enjoyed over the Playstation 2.  Developers already familiar with the Xbox 360 hardware opted to instead quickly port their titles to the PS3 hardware to take advantage of a fanbase starved for quality launch titles rather then rework existing code to take advantage of the PS3’s strengths and consequentially the quality of these PS3 ports suffered compared to their 360 counterparts for the first year.

However, as time went on developers became more confident in the PS3’s abilities and as their exclusive titles like Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Gran Turismo: Prologue began to distance themselves in quality from those of their competition, multiplatform games also quietly started to play catch-up in the background.  Even so, recent articles comparing the two heavyweight contenders still label the PS3’s early weakness with multiplatform performance as a black mark against the system.  So by what metric can we measure the quality of multiplatform releases against each other while taking into account wildly varying tastes of reviewers?

Enter Metacritic (www.metacritic.com).  Metacritic launched in 2001 as a movie review site, gathering various movie reviews and assembling them in one place for easy comparison and has broadened their scope to include videogame reviews, assigning videogames one average score based on an amalgamation of multiple, credible review sources.  Metacritic Games Editor Marc Doyle explained “A site like ours helps people cut through…unobjective promotional language…because video games are a greater investment of time and money than other forms of entertainment, gamers are much more informed about reviews than film fans or music fans. They would like to know whether that hotly anticipated title is going to deliver.”

And there’s no denying the impact that Metacritic has had on the game review landscape.  Nick Wingfield of the The Wall Street Journal wrote “Movies have Roger Ebert. Wine has Robert Parker. Videogames have Marc Doyle.”

Microsoft has considered using Metacritic scores as a deciding factor for removal of older titles from their Xbox Live service, Metacritic scores have been seen to influence stock prices as an indicator of sales potential of newly released titles and Wingfield reported that “One company requires game publishers to pay higher royalties if they receive low scores,” on sites such as Metacritic.

What SMGamers (www.smgamers.com) found in reviewing Metacritic scores of multiplatform games is the PS3 has indeed reversed the trend of lower review scores of the 2006, 2007 period to the point where for the first half of 2009, the majority of PS3 multiplatform titles released outscored the Xbox 360 versions.  54% of games released in the first half of 2009 scored higher on the PS3, 11% of the titles tied and 35% scored higher on the Xbox 360.  In contrast, from the time the PS3 was released to the end of 2007, 57% of the multiplatform games released scored higher on the 360, 26% higher on the PS3 and 17% resulted in a tie.  Clearly we can see 2008 as a transition year as of the total multiplatform games reviewed on Metacritic had 50% scoring higher on the 360, 30% higher on the PS3 and 20% dead even.

Also found in our review, according to reviewers differences between versions of games were most often slight when the game was assessed in its entirety.  Factors such as graphics, load times, and controls could all influence reviewers to award one game version a higher score versus the other but ultimately scores on average rarely strayed more then 2 or 3 points from version to version.  When choosing which console version to purchase, review sites such as Metacritic can assist you in making an informed buying decision but a difference of 2 or 3 points should not greatly influence consumers purchasing decisions.  When faced with similar review scores it all comes down to system preference, costs involved with playing online and, of course, which console you currently own.

Metacritic is completely pointless because of the fact that they have nearly EVERY review on the game....Best to stick by IGN and Gamespot personally....

Avqman: Metacritic and Sales based on userbase are pointless

The comparison is not very reliable between systems that have the same game because often the scores they get from 3rd party reviewers (IGN, 1UP, etc.) are exactly the same. The only difference is often how the official XBOX and PS reviewers score the game, and that basically apples and oranges. If the reviews were from exactly the same sources it might mean something, but they are not.

well now Xbox fans are going to agree for what i said ages ago that you can't trust Metacritic because its just a couple of reviews on the internet coming together.

last time i said it they all went WAWA -_-;

I could careless, Metacritic means shyte to me.

People ALWAYS use Meta against me when it comes to discussing games, i DONT CARE, its just abunch of shit heads talking horse shit that in the end is there OPINIONS gathered into one big ball of FAIL.

Still though, this is not that surprising given that fact PS3's exclusives came out more before the rest this year, we dont need Meta to understand that.

Since when did Metacritic become reliable again? I thought they throw in BS reviews from sites nobody's ever heard of?

Using Metacritic as a judge for multi-platforms is a bit naive...it's not the same bevy of reviewers, so how can you judge them side-by-side? If a PS site gives a game a 90 score, and a Xbox site gives it a 85...you're going to compare those 2? that makes no sense...the OP article needs to do a better job of collating and translating data to make a point. That's like saying Football players are better athletes than Hockey players because they are stronger?

BTW, this doesn't des-credit Metacritic, imho, it simply points out that you can't use it as a blanket score, without understand what the data is telling you.  It's like the Guassian Copula formulate that Wall Street used to cause the financial crisis...they mis-used it...and mis-interpretated what it was saying...not that it was total crap. 

For once I believe we agree on something. Metacritic is shit and always have been. The review system is totally broken and is made up by "journalist" (translation fanboys) of the industry.

Considering that Metacritic normalises review scores against games already out on the system the simplest explanation is that because the Xbox 360 has more games with higher scores the meta score of new games would be more likely to be normalised downwards.