Sega’s Love Affair With Metacritic
It is amazing how much importance the game industry puts on Metacritic. I get why it is a useful tool to gauge how a game is faring on the review circuit, but the way the site translates non-traditional scores (letter grades, for example) to mean something other than what the reviewer intended is terrible.
We won’t put our hands in the guts of that issue here, but the end result is a lower score based on a conversion - a score that can hurt certain individuals when a bonus is assigned to a certain score level (like 70).
So why this talk of Metacritic? Becuase the popular review aggregation site is considered mana from heaven, sweet honey on the lips of game publishers, who use it as a hammer to take away incentives from developers. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Sega Europe president and COO, Mike Hayes says that Metacritic is a useful industry tool that can help to provide “objectivity into the business.” He also points to the fact that when a company like the one he works for is paying out millions of dollars for a game, good scores are an important part of a game’s success.
Sometimes, when review scores look like they are going to be very bad for a game, instead of trying to control the message, publishers may try to control the timing. That is apparently the case with 