IGN had an interesting article this week, where they accused Metacritic of being the reason for boring games and endless sequels. Well, not Metacritic itself, but game studios in which the developers are paid according to the Metacritic score their games achieve. Which is a rather stupid measure, because it only loosely relates to sales numbers, which is what game developers' bonuses *should* depend on. As IGN says, if you target a high Metacritic score, you have to play it safe, as anything controversial can quickly result in a few negative reviews that mar your score.

The good news is that this sort of playing it safe only applies to the big budget games, and that indie games have gotten a lot better over the last couple of decades. With distribution platforms like Steam you can now actually find them, or buy them in cheap and cheerful bundles if you want to be surprised.

Metacritic also has another problem: Either fan groups or protests manipulating user review scores. For example Diablo III has a critic score of 88, and a user review score of 38, with part of that downgrade being due to protests against always-online DRM or the first days of server problems. World of Warcraft has only 883 user reviews, which is hardly representative, and then ends up with a lower score than TERA. The same game can also have very different scores, e.g. ranging from 46 to 80, if it is listed multiple times on different platforms. On the critic review side of things, some games end up with improbably high scores because they only got reviews from a handful of niche game reviewers, but presumably wouldn't do as well with a larger audience.


While the scores and averages on Metacritic just plain suck, I like the site for the links to the professional reviews, and the user reviews I can read on the site itself. While the numbers don't tell you anything, the specific points about which the reviewers talk tell a lot. If the main complaint about a game is its DRM, or that it is turn-based, I can conclude that maybe the game isn't as bad as the score suggests. If the main positive point is how you can gank your fellow players, it tells me that this isn't the game for me.