Metacritic has made changes to its controversial developer ratings. In response to community concerns over the legitimacy of assigning an average career score based on an incomplete (and disproportionate) list of reviewed games, the site has removed the overall rating from its individual developer profiles.
Effective today, the entries will no longer feature a career ranking for each developer. They will, however, still list their credited games, associated aggregate review scores, as well as the best and worst reviewed games according to Metacritic's database.
Above: David Jaffe's profile before (top) and after (bottom) Metacritic's edits. Spot the difference.
In a message posted to the site today, Metacritic's games editor Marc Doyle acknowledged the score did not paint a complete picture of a developer's history, explaining:
"Although our credits database (which is powered by our sister site GameFAQs) is growing, as our users' feedback has indicated, it is a work in progress and is not nearly as comprehensive as it needs to be to accurately provide a career score for these individuals. As such, we have removed that career score from the pages dedicated to creative individuals behind games on Metacritic. We are still very much committed to building a credits database, and welcome your participation in that process."
Doyle noted the developer ratings were added as part of Metacritic's relaunch strategy, saying the intention was to, “Make the site much more dynamic and to allow our users to discover new products by exploring other titles by the creative teams behind the movies, games, TV shows, and albums our users enjoy.”
There's value to an average developer ranking in theory, but until it can better reflect a complete body of work, and take into consideration the (subjective) “value” of some games over others, there's not much point to having one other than to piss off developers and fanboys. Not that there isn't value in pissing off developers and fanboys, there's just better, more accurate ways of going about it.
[Source: Metacritic]
Mar 29, 2011
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