Posted on: Saturday, November 17th, 2012
Posted in: News
Comments: 29
Metacritic Refuses To Change False Review Score
After Gamespot published a review filled with factual errors and misinformation, the review was pulled and a new reviewer took over the task, Metacritic still won’t change the score.
The game in question is Unknown Worlds Entertainment’s Natural Selection 2, a game combining RTS and FPS combat which it originally refined in its life as a Half Life mod. Released on October 30th, Natural Selection 2 came out to very good review scores and praise from the games media, that is with the exception of one review. Gamespot’s Freelance Reviewer, Eric Neigher, originally scored the game a 6/10 and while that would have been all well and good the community began reading the review and didn’t like what they found. In a very short span of time, visitors to Gamespot began blasting apart the review, for its many factual errors ranging from the game’s price, to loading issues, to strategies that contradicted the gameplay. The cries even went so far as to call into question Eric’s integrity as a reviewer, and wondering if he had even played the game he had reviewed, eventually culminating in Gamespot UK Senior Editor, Kevin VanOrd taking down the review and issuing an apology.
“I apologize for the inaccuracies in the review. We look forward to publishing a replacement review once we have had a chance to fully explore Natural Selection 2.” The apology reads, while the secondary review was handed over to UK Reviewer Ashton Raze to put up one that is factually correct, eventually giving it an 8/10. This is not the first time Eric’s integrity has been called into question, with Uber Entertainment, wondering if Eric had even played Monday Night Combat when he reviewed it as well.
The story however doesn’t end there, as while the score was changed and acknowledged as being wrong before, Metacritic refuses to change the score. Metacritic states that it has been a long standing policy to only accept the first score given from each reviewer. The major issue is that Metacritic also tends to weight scores for certain reviewers as more important then others, Gamespot being one of those which has seriously harmed the Natural Selection 2 score. While its easy to write off Metacritic and its scores, the sad truth is that Metacritic has been given a lot of power to shape sales and even salaries within the game’s industry.
“I’m explicit about this policy with every new publication we agree to track. It’s a critic-protection measure, instituted in 2003 after I found that many publications had been pressured to raise review scores (or de-publish reviews) to satisfy outside influences. Our policy acted as a disincentive for these outside forces to apply that type of inappropriate pressure.” Metacritic Head, Marc Doyle stated on the matter.
Sources:
Gamespot
Metacritic
VG247
Kotaku
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29 thoughts on “Metacritic Refuses To Change False Review Score”
Bah! Metacritic is screwing over developers left, right and center due to their obnoxious weighting given in the gaming industry, a low Metacritic score was what cheated Obsidian out of royalties from Fallout: New Vegas.
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/15/obsidian-missed-fallout-new-vegas-metacritic-bonus-by-one-point/
It’s instances like these that make me greatly dislike Metacritic
Our beloved hobby has been cannibalized by these conglomerate gaming review companies for far too long. While I can understand a gaming developer/publishers need for this gaming sites reviews to help push initial sales, it’s widely understood by now that reviewers have long since put to the back burner the #1 priority of a review which is to inform the audience about the game instead of their reviews used to TELL their audience what to buy & what not to buy. Reviewers like The AJ show are few and far between but I am grateful that we still have a hand full of gaming review sites (all of them “small” sites) that still know what gaming is about. The you AJ for being a gamer… even though you’re a hopeless Xbox fanboi :p .. I keed I keed… but maybe not :p
Very well put sir, you make an excellent point. I guess that’s is what’s bound to happen with such a large company like metacritic, they must caper for their money source, and it’s not us.
two things
-this is why i only trust independent reviewers like Joe
-this game looks good but also looks a lot like aliens colonial marine
I only go to metacritic for player reviews (who are generally more honest and blunt)
Weighting individual scores makes it totally biased.
This is why I only follow Joe now. He know what’s up.
Metacritic is a plague. Nuff said.
2 worthless websites bickering over a rating on a product that neither of them even made themselves.
This is why it’s stupid for companies to tie in bonuses (ie: actual money) to how these types of aggregate reviews.
I take every review as a guideline on what they liked/disliked about the game. I find myself disagreeing with a lot of people, even our fellow Angry Joe. No one should take a review for everything it is worth it is only the opinions and experiences of that person, and you might love a game that has been bashed to the ground. I for one love Infinite Undisovery, and Lost Odyssey, while i have seen less the stellar reviews for those games. Watch the reviews see what they say about the game, about 40% of all reviews have I decided with on one point or another. Like GTA IV had more flaws then merits but everyone was giving it 10’s. Don’t trust anyone, even you friends, make the call for yourself, wait a few days after release, watch a few gameplay clips, and then decide, Never by the hype!
Agreed. Games are totally subjective. One of the first things I do when looking at a new game (I never pre order) is check out the forums (especially the technical forums), watch some gameplay on youtube, check AJ’s and TB’s review if there is one. Unless im completely convinced its an awesome game worth full retail I will always wait till it goes on sale. The F2P (not pay to win) model works very well with me, I have no problems dropping a few dollars if I like the game.
Ive never trusted reviewers like gamespot and IGN. Needless to say metacritic is probably the worst. Usually when i want to buy i game i check if angryjoe has done a review or TB cause their reviews of game have allways been solid and they have good reasons for giving scores that are either low or high.
If only Gamespot wasn’t so notorious for their terrible reviewers. How many have been fired for more or less lying? Lost count.
If only Metacritic hadn’t “succeeded” like it did and ended up being the weight behind the chopping axe that’s hanging over developers necks. They wont even change a false score because.. that would be bad…?
I never go to Gamestop, I laugh at Kotaku’s biased reviews, facepalm at Metacritic, and wonder how much IGN is being paid to give good scores.
I never go to Gamespot*
sucks.
that’s why Joe, and a select few others, are the only reviewers I trust.
Hell Yeah, Angry Joe and TB are the best and reliable reviewers ever!
First off, I don’t think anyone takes metacritic seriously.
However I do agree with their policy simply because the amount of reviewers who want to adjust their scores legitimately is far outweighed by those who want to fiddle with the scores for their own agenda and claim its a legitimate change, and who is going to make sure which case is legitimate and how?
At the end of the day it was Gamespots mess up for hiring someone who couldn’t do their job properly and its not metacritics job to cover their ass. I bet gamespot probably made a fuss about metacritic to take some of the heat off themselves. Again, who takes metacritic seriously anyway? No gamer worth their salt.
I do feel bad for unknown worlds but this is squarely on gamespots shoulders in my opinion.
The sad truth Nytefury, is while consumers may not take Metacritic seriously, for some odd reason Game Publisher’s and CEO’s who don’t actually know anything about games do. This has lead to studios being shut down, or workers not receiving their profit pool bonus because the metacritic score didn’t pass a certain number.
Its disgusting how much power metacritic has when they are so horrifyingly biased in their weighted metric.
Essentially what I am saying is Yes, Gamespot should be blamed for this, especially for having to remove the review in the first place, but Metacritic is taken very seriously in the industry and their refusal to budge on this issue is very harmful to Unknown Worlds Entertainment, who will lose investors or money because of it. At the end of the day, the investors can’t be bothered to look at what games actually are and will use metacritic as their measuring stick.
I agree Setch, the losers out of this is definitely Unknown World’s. Hopefully Gamespot vet their reviewers more seriously with this, and yes, too much weight is put in metacritic.
A lot of people take Metacritic seriously. Perhaps not most gamers, but it bears a lot of influence even there. For example, most games on Steam have a metacritic score in their description. Even if you don’t trust metacritic, seeing that score subconsciously influences your decision to buy or not to buy said game. Whereas if you are someone who does trust metacritic, seeing a review score right then and there will bear a lot of weight on your decision. If you are all hyped up about a game and see a bad MC score, you’ll probably research more about it and in the end you’ll most likely not buy it, or wait until it’s on sale. If you see an unknown game with a good MC score, you’ll probably buy it right then and there.
And then there’s all the money behind the industry. Most of these CEO’s, investors etc, treat games as another form of entertainment. And since metacritic reviews all forms of entertainment, they are very familiar with it and trust it, since it contains reviews from both the public and professional critics from various sources. For them, that’s their whole target demographic right there. And if a company produces a lot of stuff that gets bad reviews, then no one will be interested in investing in it, and it’ll probably be shut down. For developers this is even worse, since there were cases that a lot of employees were fired just because the game they produced received bad MC reviews (quoting TotalBiscuit on this), even though the games themselves were quite good and received praise afterwards from players.
And in this case, MC’s policy is stupid in that it’s not lax enough to allow corrections for human error. Indeed, the first review they used was the one from Gamespot, which admitted later on that it was factually wrong. The review wasn’t changed because people disagreed with the reviewer’s opinion. The review was changed because it contained the wrong facts. In essence it was as if the reviewer didn’t play the game at all. However, MC refuses to change its score, and that will greatly affect the studio that published the game. Especially since this is their first game.
I understand and agree with most of what you have said, MC has more of an impact than it should, and speaking personally I don’t look at the MC rating on steam most of the time, but I can see even for those who don’t take it seriously it can still have an impact.
That being said while yes in this instance its reasonable for MC to change it, but who is going to vet what is a legitimate mistake from now on because they would be letting the flood gates open of claims to change ratings? They will get excusses anywhere from “oops, my finger slipped I need to change my score” to “my first score was a practice score, this one’s the real one”. Yes silly examples but im sure there would be some excuses that would out do these ones.
And yes when dealing with people in general, black and white rules don’t always work, but unless you want to pay a lot of staff to vet all these “legitimate” claims, you have to use a black and white rule. Especially since by the sounds of it, as stated by MC “It’s a critic-protection measure, instituted in 2003 after I found that many publications had been pressured to raise review scores (or de-publish reviews) to satisfy outside influences. Our policy acted as a disincentive for these outside forces to apply that type of inappropriate pressure”. So the system of allowing changes (pre 2003) simply didn’t work and was abused.
The breach of ethics was on GS behalf in my opinion, not MC, and of course the loser is the publisher (though if you believe there is no such thing as bad publicity, unknown worlds did extremely well out of this debacle).
I blame Metacritic mostly. It has way too much power and refuses to make an exception in this case, even though it would be completely justified to do so. It’s hurting Unknown Worlds for no proper reason and misusing it’s power.
At the same time, Gamespot is to blame too. It hired Eric Neigher, who had a questionable reviewing history, and it failed to proofread the review.
In the end, this hurts an indie developer who made a great game. Hopefully, if and when PCG and Gameinformer review the game, it should bring the score up quite a bit, and RPS’s review might get more sales due to it’s popularity and the respectable staff it has.
I’m not sure who to blame here. On one hand I agree with metacritic’s policy to not change reviews. However I think if a company retracts the review at the least Metacritic should also retract it and note in their game score that Gamespot had falsified info and was deleted. Giving a weighted score to a purposely bad score is a terrible business practice.
On the other hand we have Gamespot, who should pull their heads out of their asses and actually run the reviews by an editor who isn’t too busy cashing checks from the big publishing houses. Honestly I only trust their video reviews because they actually ‘show’ the problems in the game instead of letting the writers get away with anything.
Well, it’s Metacritic, so no surprise there. The damn thing is vastly overvalued and superfluous. It’s a damn shame the industry is putting actually more faith into the bloody thing than most actual gamers.
Reviewers these days I can’t trust. It’s 9/10 for games that don’t deserve it (IGN) or they are so harsh on the game for no reason (Gamespot some times).
The only reviewer I can trust is Angry Joe.
I have to agree. I can only trust someone who puts his balls on the line to appear himself and talk face to camera about the game. Even if I don’t agree 100% it is pretty easy to tell that Joe actually played the game. With text reviews its too easy to fake it or regurgitate a press release.
Thanks Setch. I’m glad to see this reported here as well as in TotalBiscuit’s channel. This really can’t be allowed to go unnoticed.
And that’s why the best review you can get is the one you make yourself.