Slapstic Moan About Metacritic

Slapstic, the “humurous gaming blog”, has posted about the two hot flavours of the month: Killzone and Metacritic, and how, in its opinion, the Metascore for Killzone 2 has been ‘artificially boosted’ by lesser known websites, and specifically singling out PS3Bloggen.se.  The good thing about TSA having its own Blog section is that we can pick up on these things, comment in our own personal way about them, and then get on with the job of running the site.  Think of it as something of a diversion.

So, in a not-particularly-humourous article, Slapstic cite the blog’s Alexa score as being a basis for exclusion from Metacritic, because, according to Alexa, the blog’s ranking is less than 600,000 in the World.  Not only is this absolutely irrelevent, but it’s deeply problematic.  Alexa don’t know how many hits your website gets, they guess, based on the number of people that have the Alexa toolbar installed (and probably a couple of other equally scatty methods) and thus take an average and multiply it up.  If your site suddenly gets a shedload of hits one day, your Alexa ranking will jump up to reflect this, which obviously isn’t a gauge on how respected your site is and is equally no reflection on your writing or editorial standards.

Slapstic also says the non-English speaking blog “has as much pull on the Metacritic average as G4TV, 1UP, GamePro, Edge, or any other large publication” which is also factually incorrect – Metacritic, as you’ll know from our recent interview, weights publications accordingly, and the presence of European reviews is especially useful for Metacritic and its readers.  “If Metacritic allows just anyone who has created a blog to be counted in the average, then I feel that they’re cheating themselves,” says Slapstic, “Killzone 2’s average got unfairly boosted by the PS3Bloggen review.”   Oh, now I see.