Just copy Metacritic but get rid of Play Magazine?

I mean, honestly Metacritic seems to have a nice selection of magazines and such. I would probably just cut the ratings out all together myself if i were you.

Gamerankings does a pretty good job as well and can show you which reviewers have some bias and which don't.

Those two only take from some sites (but a large number of review sites so it's a more accurate sample.)

Doing the same thing but only with a few major review sites instead of a large number of proffesional review sites would do nothing but lower the statistical reliability of the reviews.

Alternativly you may want to convince some people to just do reviews for you and have two or three people do reviews for each game... and use that as your "Site Reviews"

Of course that might be tough as you'll have to try and sift out a few people with no bias except for liking good games. Otherwise you'll end up with people stupidly rating games higher just so "Wii has twice as many 9+ rated games then 360!!" etc.

A couple fanboys could screw that up in a race pretty well. Though that's why i'd suggest 2-3 reviewers a game. Perfefably tough reviewers.

Maybe just use Gamerankings and Metacritic?

All the work is already done: just add both, and the overall percentage should be quite accurate...

If you really want to do it the hard way, with 10 to 20 sources, and add some european reviews into the mix, in french, i usually visit these two "big" sites:

http://www.jeuxvideo.com/etajvbis.htm

http://www.gamekult.com/

Of course, there are a few others, but these two have usually decent reviews and scores...

And i agree about Famitsu, we need at least one japanese source as well...

Btw, my favorite site for Wii reviews is:

http://www.thewiire.com/gameslist.php?display=reviews&sort=desc

It never appears in Gamerankings or Metacritic, so... but of course, it's Wii, and Wii only...

I don't know about Metacritic, but Gamerankings just uses respected reviewers for its overall score (it does have a second score that uses every review submitted).  That way we don't have to go through the trouble of entering 5-10 seperate reviews since we can already enter one that encompasses all of those.

 Also, I respect what you're trying to do to make this site as complete as possible, but is it worth it to make it a game rankings site too?  I mean it's neat to have that information readily available, but it's almost like we're becoming a jack of all trades which means we're a master of none.  I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud here and I'll shut up now.

I think it's cool you're making a one stop shop for everything. The more inclusive the site is, the more visitors you'll get.

I think that it is more important to add more accurate data, or at least state "European data not avaliable" to stress that it has actually sold more

I think that Metacritic and Gamerankings are the way to go, although you should have to wait until all the major sites have reviewed it there

I don't get the point of duplicating gameranking/metacritic's work. Just leave the system as it is. fanboys will be fanboys, but it's not a big deal

I'd just use Metacritic/Gamerankings score.

But if you want seperate sites/magazines: IGN, 1UP, Gamespot, Eurogamer, GameInformer, Famitsu, Edge, Play, GameSpy, Nintendo Power, OXM, OPM.

There are too many reviewers out there. I think there are a handful or so that everyone can agree generally do a good job. I think the specific ones like OXM, PSM, etc. shouldn't be used... IGN, Gamespot, Edge, Play, Game Informer, and a couple of others. That would be "industry reviews" I would also like a "user reviews" as well.

The problem with user reviews is people just put in random stuff as a fanboy and say Oh Boyz Dis Game is da booooooomb 10+++. Insead of allowing that, create 4 or 5 categories with radio buttons on them. Say Graphics, Gameplay, Story, Sound, Control. 1-5 buttons. Also REQUIRE a short paragraph describing the review -- some minimum number of words to force the person to think about their review and then 2 boxes that must be filled in for both pluses and minuses. That way people won't just jump in head first. Allow the mods to delete obvious flamebait and crap where people just put random rubbish into the database.

I'd be happy to be a mod to help on this one as I have quite a few recent titles for the 360 and have played a bunch. I'd both enter reviews and grab the data from other sites as I enjoy reading other reviews...

Compiling text reviews and assigning an official VGChartz score, and re-posting some conglomeration of other sites' scores, are two different things. Right now we're working on the latter though we hope to eventually do the former, at which point we could have our score, critics' score, user score, in a similar fashion to a lot of other sites out there.

I like GameRankings and the like because the biggest review sources go into the score and they get weighted accordingly by their reliability and such. A lot of the work you're talking about ioi is already done in there. The real issue is whether or not we can just repost all their scores and how much credit we need to give and such. Maybe some kind of partnership to let our database pull the score dynamically from their site, which some places do.