Believe it or not, but some people find Metacritic to be a little bit on the unreliable side, and for good reason.
Metacritic gathers scores from numerous publications for the latest games and assigns a meta-score for each game. In practice it sounds like a great idea, what could go wrong? Well, Metacritic doesn’t exactly play by the rules.
Some websites don’t score games on the traditional 1-10, 1-100 or 1-5, but instead assign letters similar to school grades or just no score at all, just an overall opinion.
Metacritic still assigns a numerical score to sites who don’t score using the traditional methods and its lead to some anger throughout the gaming community with one chap in particular being especially peeved.
Enter Jonathan Cooper, one of Naughty Dog’s animators currently working on Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.
Joystiq recently announced that they will no longer be scoring reviews in the traditional method, something Cooper seems to be in support of.
In a Twitter discussion that stemmed from Cooper tweeting the news of Joystiq’s new review scoring policy, the animator revealed that Metacritic numbers have cost him financially, and not just pocket change.
Cooper reckons he’s lost “tens of thousands” of dollars due to Metacritic numbers, even though he states he has an average Metacritic rating of 96 for each of the games he has worked on.
.@ragollian Exactly. I’ve a 96 metacritic under my belt, but have also lost tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses because of these numbers
— Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) January 14, 2015
Cooper then went on to criticise the CBS owned website.
@LewieP @ragollian Rewards should always factor in quality. It’s how metacritic judges quality that’s in question.
— Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) January 14, 2015
Metacritic isn’t the most reliable place to get a fair opinion of a game’s true value, just look at the user reviews for each years biggest hits and you’ll find many a troll voting the lowest possible for unfounded reasons.
He also takes a dig at game producers, suggesting that a change in the way bonuses are rewarded would give produces an incentive to schedule accurately.
@teamonkey @ragollian That would incentivise producers to schedule accurately.
— Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) January 14, 2015
It’s not all bad though, at least he’s going to E3 this year! The animator tweeted earlier that he is registered for E3 2015. Maybe we’ll see a lot more of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End? Hopefully.
It’s January and I’m registered for E3 already. Can’t wait! — Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) January 16, 2015
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