Playfin

Gamespot ran a story today about some tomfoolery regarding review scores for the new Jurassic Park video game on Metacritic. Apparently, some employees of Telltale Games, the company responsible for making the game, submitted several perfect user reviews without disclosing their identities, which is considered to be a no-no by many in the industry. Metacritic, for those who may not have heard of it, is a site that collects reviews on games, movies, and music and condenses them into “Metascores”. For instance, the recently-released “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” received scores from 13 critics (typically reputable magazines and websites) that averaged out to a Metascore of 95/100. Metacritic also allows users to write their own reviews, which it averages out to a separate score out of 10, which is what the employees in question did. So why are people making such a big deal out of this — if these employees truly like the game they made, shouldn’t they be able to express their opinions just like everyone else?

Before I answer that question, let’s talk some more about Metacritic. It’s a huge site — it gets somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.4 million visits per month. It has also become one of the chief tools in the gaming industry for evaluating the success of new releases. The reason for this is that Metacritic attempts to get around the bias of individual websites and critics by averaging many review scores in order to give consumers a better picture of the average opinion.

Bias is really the key concept here, because bias is exactly why people are angry. They argue that no game developer is going to give his or her own game a poor review score, so they are introducing even more bias into the system than the average user or critic might. Furthermore, if they don’t at least identify themselves as developers, this bias can’t be taken into consideration by the people like you and I who use Metacritic to inform their purchasing decisions. Case in point — if a crummy game gets released, and all of the employees give the game a glowing review on Metacritic, they artificially raise the Metascore for their own game. As a consequence, more people will buy it (and probably regret it) than if the employees hadn’t posted at all, or had at least identified themselves appropriately.

Share your thoughts on the matter! Are people overreacting, or did these employees really betray the trust of the gaming community?

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