The all-conquering Metacritic (which aggregates game, movie and music review scores from trusted sources) says it has blacklisted one particular website due to “corrupt” practices, although it’s worth mentioning that this doesn’t appear to be a recent action.
Speaking to CVG on the back of an A Jumps! B Shoots! podcast, Metacritic’s Marc Doyle said that “on one occasion I did discontinue my coverage of a publication’s reviews because of what I considered to be corrupt practices” and says that there are “many reasons” why he would “drop somebody” from the listings.
[drop2]”There’s corruption – people can be bought, absolutely.”Metacritic currently takes TheSixthAxis’ PlayStation 3 listings as part of its weighted ‘meta’ score, which gives readers an overall, balanced review score out of a hundred for pretty much every game that’s been released for years. It’s a brilliant ready-reckoner when you don’t have time to read a full review.
The process for getting into the Metacritic listings isn’t trivial. “It’s the quality of the analysis,” says Doyle, “the quality of the writing; do they have an audience; are they respected in the gaming community… is there a reputation for scoring integrity?”
“People have screwed around and just tried to dig for hits for various reasons, and so we’ve lost a lot of sites for ridiculous reasons” he admits. Doyle’s industry standard invention was started in 2001 and bought out by CNet in 2005, and is one of the most respected sites on the net.
Our reviews are all listed here.
Nauraph
I didn’t know you guys were in the Metacritic listings. Very nicely done. ^^
Zephyre
Aw, I was looking for a name and shame article.
gideon1451
I always found it odd that they listed OPM & the like in the ratings. Surely they’re quite influenced?
beeje13
They sometimes do give poor ratings to sony exclusive games, and the official xbox mag said Bioshock Infinite was the best game of E3, when it had Sony’s backing, at the Sony conference etc…
So they’re very balanced. :)
jimmy-google
Future run pretty much all of the magazines so the reviews tend to be quite balanced between different formats.
Boomshanks
They aren’t as biased as you might think when hearing the name. The Dutch OPM is quite open about the fact that they like the 360 as much as they do the PS3.
beeje13
Probably Edge, I couldn’t belive how biased they were to a paticular console, but ‘corruption’ is on another level, I thought they were just immature.
tom_lord
mmmm, I see you’re point about Edge, I’m not a fan
Crocadillian
It’s nice to see that the website takes itself seriously from reading the CVG article. Just out of curiosity (and preventative measures), I would have liked to of known the website that got removed from Metacritic though. Anyone have any ideas?
xdarkmagician
It’s likely we’ll never know. I noticed in his quote that he replies that “…what I considered to be corrupt practices” meaning he suspected curruption but had only personal feelings and no physical proof. It’s meta’s right to allow whomever they want in, and can stop using any sites review, but to accuse a site of curruption with no proof is considered lible (and slander if he’s verbally accusing a particular site) which would bring legal action. Although, I do wish he’d play a game of “rhymes with…”
ray_gillespie
“Our reviews are all listed here.”
Show-boaters :P
Seriously though, I’ve always been impressed that you managed to get into Metacritic so quickly.
kjkg
It’s a bit unfortunate that when you go to thesixthaxis’ profile on metacritic, it chooses Singstar Vol 2 as your highest rated game. You have given several games 10/10, but it chooses that one to advertise to the world??
xdarkmagician
While I often visit Meta and realize that it’s really just a calculator of sorts that does the math. I still feel the industry relies too heavily on it to judge a games true value. I’m also kinda surprised that it was only one occasion, I always figured that most larger sites, owned by say… stores like gamestop, but not specifically gamestop… are currupt as they tend to focus on only positive selling points and never really say anything negative,and even when they finally do say something like ‘this game is average at best’ they still give it a 7.75 on a 10 scale.
Mick939
I think opm and oxm are very well balanced mags whereas some other mags *cough edge* cant review for shit. The sixth axis reviews are overall very well balanced and written and deserve to be theee. Though non of us tend to always agree e.g duke and the infamous prototype war..
tom_lord
What I like about OPM is, whatever the score is, the reasoning behind the score is always spot on. It’s very rare to read a review that doesn’t match the score.
jimmy-google
My biggest issue with metacritic is that from a consumer point of view it’s not helping those that need it most. Games like GTA and COD get over 50 reviews but those reviews are unlikely to change someones view about buying the game.
Other games that get a lot of reviews are games that those who would buy them probably already know about them.
Parents that are looking to buy a game for their kids, say Hannah Montana, have very few reviews. In this case Hannah Montana only has 2 reviews which isn’t even enough to get a metacritic score where as GTA IV has 64 reviews ranging form 87 to 100.
Either metacritic isn’t giving much focus to these games or magazines and websites simply aren’t bothering to review them (probably because they don’t provide hits or sales). I know OPM often provides a very small amount text on some of these games but doesn’t score them so they can’t appear on metacritic.