Metacritic says its experiment with scoring individual game developers won’t be coming back after all.
It came out a couple of days ago that Metacritic was dabbling with scores for individual game makers. The dev rating had apparently been going on since the site relaunched last August but had only recently come to widespread public attention. And then they were gone, pulled, according to Metacritic Co-Founder and Games Editor Marc Doyle, because of concerns about inaccuracies in the ratings.
The original plan was to bring developer scores back once those concerns were addressed but Doyle now says they’re gone for good. “We have no plans to bring it back. Right now we just want to see if we can build the database, take a shot at it, see what we can do,” he told GamesIndustry. “We discussed it as a team and it made sense to just drop that overall number whilst still trying to build this database which will be difficult, but we’re going to give it a shot. It’s needless to put that number on it though.”
Doyle said the accuracy question that brought the initiative to a halt is largely the fault of the industry itself. He defended the original intent of the ratings, however, and said that he’d be happy to work with developers and publishers to improve the database. “We’ve found it very tough in some cases to say who has been responsible for a game,” he explained. “I think that is an issue of the industry not needing or not wanting to put that information out there. I don’t know exactly what’s behind that, I haven’t discussed that with too many publishers.”
“If by this issue coming about in the last week all of a sudden the publishers and developers are like, ‘yes, let’s standardize this whole system’ and everyone wanted to go out there and in every game attach their credits, then we could hire someone to simply input that into our system,” he said. “But… I don’t necessarily see that happening.”
