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.
Death_In_Flamez
Anyone been to gametrailers? Usually they suck Xbox and Call of Duty and Uncharted like theres no tomorrow. It’s disgusting. Uncharted came away with 3 of their “best of E3” when there were clearly better candidates in the categories.
jimmy-google
Like what? There were a lot of good games at E3 but I wouldn’t argue with Uncharted 3 picking up a lot of awards.
blarty
The issue with Edge is that their review scores between 360 and PS3 are either woefully biased or knowingly inconsistent. Someone did a cross section of the top 30 games (360, Multiplatform and PS3 exclusives) and it showed a rather large leaning to greater underscoring (against other reviewers) of PS3 games than it did of 360. http://edgevsmeta.blogspot.com/2010/03/edge-vs-metacritic-does-games-platform.html
The problem is, of course, if the magazine as a whole is pro-360 biased then it’s so obvious to all who read it, and if it is an issue of reviewer consistency, surely they should rotate the reviewers for platforms. It’s no use having a reviewer on PS3 that’s far more strict and critical than the one on 360.
But irrespective of why the discrepancy between platforms exist, Edge will not change, it is after all the Daily Mail of gaming publications – thinks it’s better than everyone else, likes to stand on some kind of moral, authoritarian soapbox, but is really just a big bag of **** that talks with a posh accent.
Foxhound
TSA is the only place I need. Reviews are on the together :-)
minerwilly
Agreed , in 9 out of ten instances i fully agree with TSA’s scores so im sticking here even if TSA are one day kicked from Meta.
Kaminari
Many sites are openly biased, through financial compensations or simple fanboyism. The whole score aggregation is a farce. You can’t rely on half of the “official” scores published around.
Compiling reviews of different origins, yes, that’s very useful. Producing an average note based on dubious scores which all have different scales of analysis quality, then NO.