Metacritic: The Power of User Reviews

Anyone shopping online is familiar with rating portals and customer ratings: it doesn’t matter if it’s a local two-star pizza delivery service for charred margaritas or a five-star mail order company for an expensive TV – in 2022 we’ve been trained to rate everything and as a result ( Apparently) we get an impression of the quality of the corresponding product.

Ratings have been a part of computer and video games since the medium’s early days. Initially, print magazines, later websites, blogs, and YouTube formats were more than happy to give games percentage ratings, seals, or other awards as evidence of outstanding or even substandard gaming experiences. If you are looking for an overview of ratings and average ratings awarded, you will find them on Metacritic. The website, founded in 2001, summarizes test ratings from recorded media and then spits out a so-called Metascore on a scale from 0 to 100. It additionally delivers Metacritic User score based on user ratings based on average value from 0 to 10.

Metacritic or even those that exist steam Player-generated reviews offer one thing above all else: a quick and seemingly objective overview of the game’s qualities. However, Metacritic is more than just a buying advice. Due to its wide reach, the portal has a strong influence on game development, the people behind it, and the gaming culture in general.

Traffic light shows how good or bad the games are: Metacritic identifies product quality levels in green, yellow and red.

Source: Plasma Media Agency



Metacritic undoubtedly raises questions, and if you think about numbers a little, it also brings with it some fundamental difficulties. For example, the portal groups press ratings together and quickly grades them to a system of 100 despite different rating approaches. Problem: Gates adjusted in increments of 5 change the mean computed by Metacritic dramatically. Metacritic itself writes in the context of this “weighted average” (i.e., “weighted average”) and asserts that some publications and representatives of the press are rated higher than others. However, this is not clearly identifiable or even transparent. It is not uncommon for the first ten ratings recorded to be critical in determining the initial trend.

Already in 2015 American journalist Jason Schreyer criticized for his American website Kotaku Metacritic’s influence on game design. Metacritic ratings have been an obstacle to bonus payments and also as employment criteria in contracts between publishers and developers. The apparent dependence on Metacritic has also had an impact on the perception of the projects themselves. Not only were the wants and needs of paying customers taken into account, but the preferences of the press were directed more aggressively in order to increase Metascore. There is hardly any talk of “creative freedom” here.

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