The site was trying to be helpful to its users, but faulty information hampered its efforts.
This week, review aggregator Metacritic started posting scores for developers, based on the average metascore of the games they’d worked on. The scores were part of Metacritic’s relaunch last August, but were recently pulled shortly after gaining greater public awareness. This left more than one person confused, prompting an explanation from the site’s games editor, Marc Doyle.
Writing on the Metacritic blog, Doyle said that the reason the scores went up in the first place was to help people find new games that they might enjoy. The plan was that users would be able to click on the creator of a game they liked, and see what else he or she had worked on. Doyle noted that it already worked that way for the Metacritic’s movie, TV, and music reviews, and that the site wanted to add the same functionality to the games section.
Unfortunately, it transpired that the information that the site had for videogames wasn’t as accurate as the details it had for other media. For movie credits, Doyle wrote, Metacritic licensed the information from IMDB, but for videogames, it came from Metacritic’s sister site, GameFAQs, which contained a much higher rate of inaccuracies.
Doyle said that Metacritic was committed to creating a credits database for videogames, but acknowledged that the information it was using was incomplete at best. The scores will be making a return – mores the pity – but not until Metacritic is convinced that the information is correct.
Source: via CVG
