Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows,
DVDs, and formerly, books.
For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged.
It was created and founded by Jason Dietz, Marc Doyle, and Julie Doyle Roberts.
An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source.
Three colour codes of Green, Yellow and Red summarize the critic's recommendation, giving
an idea of the general appeal of the product among reviewers and, to a lesser extent, the
public.
The site is somewhat similar to Rotten Tomatoes, but the scoring results sometimes differ very
drastically, due to Metacritic's method of scoring that converts each review into a percentage
that the site decides for itself, before taking a weighted average based on the critic's fame
or stature, and listing different numbers of reviews.
In addition to its Television ratings it also reviews music albums, video games, movies,
and DVDs.
Many review websites give a review grade out of five, out of ten, out of a hundred, or
even an alphabetical score.
Metacritic converts such a grade into a percentage.
For reviews with no explicit scores, Metacritic manually assesses the tone of the review before
assigning a relevant grade.
Weighting is also applied to reviews—those from major periodicals may have a greater
effect on the average than niche ones, although Metacritic refuses to reveal what weights
are applied to which publications.
History Metacritic was launched in January 1999 by
Marc Doyle, along with his sister Julie Doyle Roberts and a classmate from the University
of Southern California law school, Jason Dietz.
Rotten Tomatoes was already compiling movie reviews at the time, but Doyle, Roberts, and
Dietz "saw an opportunity to cover a broader range of media".
They sold Metacritic to CNET in 2004.
CNET and Metacritic are owned by the CBS Corporation.
Nick Wingfield of The Wall Street Journal wrote in September 2004, "Mr. Doyle, 36, is
now a senior product manager at CNET but he also acts as games editor of Metacritic".
Speaking of video games, Doyle said, "A site like ours helps people cut through...unobjective
promotional language".
He also said "By giving consumers, and web users specifically, early information on the
objective quality of a game, not only are they more educated about their choices, but
it forces publishers to demand more from their developers, license owners to demand more
from their licensees, and eventually, hopefully, the games get better".
Doyle said, "I don't want to overstate our role in this area, but we're highlighting
the review process", which he thinks was not taken as seriously when unconnected magazines
and websites were providing their reviews in isolation.
In August 2002, Metacritic website's appearance was heavily revamped.
The reaction to the new format from existing Metacritic users was overwhelmingly negative.
Metascores Metacritic's scores are weighted averages—certain
publications are given more significance "based simply because of their stature".
Metacritic Games Editor Marc Doyle was interviewed by Keith Stuart of The Guardian to "get a
look behind the metascoring process".
Stuart wrote "the metascore phenomenon, namely Metacritic and GameRankings, have become an
enormously important element of online games journalism over the past few years".
Doyle said that 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."
The ranging metascores for games, films, television programs and music are:
Criticism of game metascores Many video game reviewers take issue with
the way Metacritic assigns scores.
When a game reviewer gives a video game a rating of "A", Metacritic assigns it a value
of 100.
When a reviewer gives a game a rating of "F", Metacritic assigns it a value of 0—although
some reviewers think a score of 50 is more appropriate.
When a reviewer gives a game a rating of "B-", Metacritic assigns it a value of 67—and
many publishers, developers, and websurfers think that the score should be closer to 80.
A former editor at the review site Game Revolution, Joe Dodson, criticized Metacritic and similar
sites, saying their conversion system was turning their reviews into scores that were
too low.
Doyle said "I feel that ANY scale simply needs to be converted directly with its lowest possible
grade equating to 0, and the highest to 100."
Doyle said some publishers want him to include certain critics that Metacritic does not track
and some want certain critics excluded, usually because they give a game a poor review.
Another common complaint from US publishers is that British critics should not be reviewing
games that are based on American sports like the NFL, NASCAR, or the NBA.
Doyle said, "Conversely, many European publishers feel that American critics are not qualified
or properly situated to review football, rally, F1, cricket and rugby games".
Doyle said, "once I've decided to track a publication, I cannot pick and choose which
reviews I list on Metacritic based on such individual judgments".
Publishers often try to persuade Doyle to exclude reviews they feel are unfair, but
Doyle said that after a publication has been included in the system, he refuses to omit
any reviews that receive complaints.
The Xentax Foundation analyzed the games related data at Metacritic and published their findings
in a 30 page comprehensive paper on January the 19th, 2014.
One of the conclusions of the author, Mike Zuurman, was "The data at Metacritic leaves
much to be desired and seems to be heavily biased", while calling the validity and the
accuracy of the data "low".
Influence of game metascores Nick Wingfield of The Wall Street Journal
has written that Metacritic "influence[s] the sales of games and the stocks of videogame
publishers", citing as example "One company [which] requires game publishers to pay higher
royalties if they receive low scores on such sites".
Wingfield explains the influence of the website as coming from the higher cost to consumers
of buying video games than for buying music or movie tickets.
Many executives say that low scores "can hurt the long-term sales potential" of game franchises.
Wingfield wrote that Wall Street is paying attention to Metacritic and Game Rankings
because the sites typically post scores before any sales data are publicly available, citing
the rapid rise and fall in value, respectively, of the relevant game companies following the
release of BioShock and Spider-Man 3.
In an interview with The Guardian, Marc Doyle cited, "two major publishers" which "conducted
comprehensive statistical surveys through which they've been able to draw a correlation
between high metascores and stronger sales" in certain genres.
Doyle further claimed that an increasing number of businesses and financial analysts use Metacritic
as "an early indicator of a game's potential sales and, by extension, the publisher's stock
price."
In 2004, Jason Hall of Warner Bros. began "including 'quality metrics' in the contracts
the studio signed with partners interested in licensing Warner movies for games".
If a product does not receive specific scores or better from aggregator sites like Metacritic,
some deals require game publishers to pay higher royalties to Warner Bros.
In 2008, Microsoft began using Metacritic review averages to de-list underperforming
Xbox Live Arcade games.
Further criticism of the website Under recent years, Metacritic has been the
subject of heavy criticism due to the controversial way the website currently handles the banning
of users and their reviews with no notices or proper appeals for the affected.
Critics and developers alike have pointed out the website's lack of personnel management
along with the automatic systems as video-games in particular, can be "Bombed" with 0/10 ratings
under just one night, severely damaging the reputation of a video-game title.
Signal Studios president and creative director Douglas Robert Albright III has gone forth
and described the website to have "No standards".
CBS Interactive, the current owners of Metacritic has been the main targets of this criticism
following the overwhelming negative response of the website re-making at 2002 while also
having an F rating at the Better Business Bureau, being described as uncommunicative
while conducting "Shady" business practices by users.
Game ranking This is the top 10 games with best metascore
in the site.
Best game per year This a list of the games with best metascore
per year.
Best exclusive per platform This list shows the best exclusive game of
each platform on Metacritic.
See also Rating site
Review aggregator References
External links Official website