Look, numbers without any context!
Perhaps we’re finally moving toward a world where slapping an 8.2 score on a video game will become a thing of the past. Metacritic says it will do away with its plan to list developer ratings. The system had launched last summer but has generated a bit of controversy in recent days as high-profile developers like Cliff Bleszinski (from Epic Games) began to complain. A few more days go by, and now it’s dead and buried.
Metacritic told GamesIndustry.biz that it “has no plans to bring it back,” noting that their idea now is to slowly build a developer database based on more solid data than
The idea, while, again, ludicrous from the start—what’s the obsession with labeling what amounts to works of art with a number?—was even flawed in execution.
Let’s say Developer A worked on 20 games, but Metacritic only had scores for the last five. The “developer score” would only reflect these last fives games.
The sooner publishers stop putting “SCORED A 9.5/10 ON METACRITIC” on game boxed the sooner we can move past this nonsense. Review numbers are silly to begin with, but to then aggregate these numbers is even sillier.