What do you think about Metcacritic?

What do you think about Metcacritic?

  • Influences my purchase decision significantly

    Votes: 4 2.6%
  • Quite useful to quickly filter out total flops

    Votes: 52 34.4%
  • Doesn’t interest me

    Votes: 36 23.8%
  • It's interesting, but i don’t take it seriously

    Votes: 48 31.8%
  • Great for console wars

    Votes: 11 7.3%

  • Total voters
    151
Don't really care about press scores nowadays, specially when they dock points for games lacking " diversity".



Independent YouTuber reviews + steam reviews are far more informative to me.
 
Metacritic itself isn't all that special, but it is useful to see a quick spread of review scores across a bunch of publications all at once.

But I think metacritic does exactly what it's designed to do, which is get a very broad and general opinion of a game based on the common denominator of gamers. If you look at the top-rated games of any given year, it usually matches up quite well with the games that have been critically/communally acclaimed and awarded.

It's a useful tool to see what games are unexpectedly doing well or poorly. Part of the reason I even tried Clair Obscur was because it had such abnormally high ratings for a JRPG, and that game is currently my GOTY.
 
I like the idea of it more than the execution.

User reviews are worthless and reviews from outlets being weighted differently is a strange concept. I prefer Open-critic in that regard.

But if you jump into a new system and look at the top 20 games on most of these kinds of sites you'll be playing 99% of what most people (on here, for example) would be recommending. So I can't really complain, they do a good job of compiling the best stuff and making it easy to find imo.
 
if i count all the games that i have played the most in these last years, surely there are quite a bunch rated below 70 on Metacritic
 
Basically what I've always felt about it: a collective of industry hustlers, but now it seems to be agenda-driven activism for their political stances. Journalism was just the foot in the door.
 
I grew up on Reviews with gaming magazines so i look up games on MC but they are not as deciding for me i enjoyed many games which got a lower score.
 
Read somewhere it's often the metric devs get their bonusses from so that probably has a very weird effect on games reviews and even development. Doesn't sound like a very smart arrangement.

Should just let AI internally review games instead, leaves less room for corruption and collusion between staff and games media outlets for personal monetary gain.

That's a nice idea for a product you can sell to publishers.

We've seen enough high metacritic in-clique dev games eat shit commercially for this to be a sensible move forward, honestly.
 
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Gaming press is part of the industry's machinery. In another words, I don't care about it. Also, I dislike the idea about reducing a game's value to a number.
 
I think that there's an element of games getting the kind of scores that the hype dictates and that your genre preference may override the review score.

Based on review scores, I never would have bought Dead Island 2.

Absolutely loved it. Really think it's underrated. Conversely, I've played solid-gold-95-scoring games that I didn't care at all for.

If a game is in a genre I am interested in and is competently presented, I'm far more inclined to look at what a game will have me doing during gameplay rather than what a game scores.

I also don't think the difference between an 80 rated game and a 90 rated game in a genre I like means much.

So yeah, I'm interested to see what the scores come out at, but I'm much more likely to make my own decisions, rather than let review scores do it for me.
 
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Outsourcing critique to the general public is the worst idea ever. The average person is NOT intelligent. You can see this plainly in "user reviews" with egregious misspellings and poor grammar, incoherent unstructured sentences, rambling stream-of-consciousness word salad. It's a fucking nightmare.
 
Outsourcing critique to the general public is the worst idea ever. The average person is NOT intelligent. You can see this plainly in "user reviews" with egregious misspellings and poor grammar, incoherent unstructured sentences, rambling stream-of-consciousness word salad. It's a fucking nightmare.
Public review are not here to give you a good analysis. There are here to give a feeling/feedback. It's ok if they cannot explain it or analyze it.
It's often what I'm more interested in as when I play or watch movie, I'm there to get a good time and not to try to analyze why this game or movie is good or bad.

There's a lot of issues with public review but that's not one.
 
Public review are not here to give you a good analysis. There are here to give a feeling/feedback. It's ok if they cannot explain it or analyze it.
It's often what I'm more interested in as when I play or watch movie, I'm there to get a good time and not to try to analyze why this game or movie is good or bad.

There's a lot of issues with public review but that's not one.
It is the BIGGEST issue. Trying to gauge a product's worth by some simpleton's "feeling" is disastrous. It is not ok if they can't explain or analyze - they should not be trying to write reviews.
 
Metacritic has only ever been useful at its extremes to let you know if something you were interested in has something to be wary of or worth a 2nd look.

Still, Steam reviews are easily more useful, because I trust the general audience more than press who will give 8/10 to slop.
 
I use it to avoid total flops. What is funny is that I had some of the best time with games that have "low" scores like Evil Within, Mafia, Risen etc.
 
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Metacritic is one of the technological achievements consumers enjoy in the digital age.

Nowhere else are consumers able to state their opinions about digital products on an open platform in such a popular fashion (aside from the less popular alternatives like OpenCritic, Steam etc.).

I could imagine laws in, for example, the European Union, forcing platforms to integrate Metacritic on their stores so consumers could make a more informed choice.
 
It makes me happy if games that interest me have a high score on it.

If not - 🤷‍♂️.
I will still buy the game.

One of my all time favorite games, Digimon World 3, has a Metascore of 47.


That being said, I do think that reveals, and/or even anticipation of Metacritic scores are events in their own right, and a good topic to have a talk about, and get hyped.
 
It's for clueless amateurs until they see and understand patterns in content releases. When you get there, you are not different from middle age reviewer with taste and writing skills.
 
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