Back in March, we decried the way percentile ranking sites like Metacritic have permeated gaming culture, explained that we might be better off reading review text rather than paying attention to a suspicious scoring system, and suggested that gamers "just leave Metacritic to the suits" who use such digits to appeal to investors. But the Cult of Metacritic has grown in power since March, and is now threatening to influence our games from behind the scenes.
1.) Metacritic scores have been recognized by Microsoft as a reasonable benchmark for Xbox LIVE Arcade games. If after six months a title has failed to achieve a Metacritic score of 65 or greater -- just like every title on this list -- then they are candidates for delisting from the XBLA service. While there are few titles I'd miss with Metacritic scores of 65 or below, regardless of where they appear (even cult classic God Hand scored a respectable 73) I'm sure some of our readers will feel differently; and there's no telling who might follow Microsoft's lead.
More importantly:
2.) MTV Multiplayer reports today that Metacritic can influence how much, or even if, a game developer receives a bonus for sales of a successful title:
Former GameSpot reviewers Jeff Gerstmann (Giant Bomb) and Alex Navarro said they’ve not only heard of this practice but even know developers that were caught up in it. “I’ve gotten e-mails from developers over the years who have said, ‘I don’t think you realize what you’re doing to me with this review’ because my review knocked them out of the range of some bonus that they were up for,” Gerstmann told me. That’s something that really troubles me… When I’m sitting down to write a review I’m never setting out to think: ‘I am taking food off this guy’s table.’”
Now, you can certainly look at this in a positive light -- something on the order of, "wouldn't it be wonderful if publishers financed titles that are actually better, rather than titles that simply sell well" -- but then you'd be forgetting that Metacritic is an opaque, weighted system that artificially translates reviews into percentages; and that if a title is selling well to begin with, its developers deserve a proportionate share of the windfall regardless of what reviewers think.
Should Metacritic wield this sort of influence unchallenged? We say no, and that's one more reason our reviews will bear no scores. Metacritic cannot compile data from our words alone, and should other websites follow suit, they will revert to the purpose for which we still believe they hold value -- as an excellent aggregator of review links.
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