Games needed to have sales data available in order to be included in all, 31 games are in this study. The only systems that I included are the Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Xbox 360, and Wii. I also feel that 10 weeks of sales data is enough to draw conclusions between the possible effects of Metacritic scores on game sales. May is the first month that all of the titles released had sales data for the full 10-week period. I did this because my source for game releases and sales data, VGChartz, only publishes the first 10 weeks of sales. In order to have a manageable sample, I limited my study to games released during the month of May 2009. Are publishers justified in using Metacritic in such a way? I decided to investigate the issue by tracking game sales and their accompanying Metacritic scores to find out the relationship between the two. However, we all know that publishers use Metacritic scores to pressure developers by tying those scores to monetary compensation. Whether or not Game Informer actually implied such is irrelevant to the observation that review score inflation would be at the detriment of the gaming public. Games journalist Mitch Krpata criticized the article, claiming that Game Informer was calling for reviewers to inflate scores in order to keep the Metacritic aggregate high. Schofield states that “the difference between an 89 and a 90 is a big-ass deal.” The September 2009 issue of Game Informer published a feature discussing the merits of review aggregator Metacritic through the lens of Glen Schofield, former general manager for Visceral Games, which developed and released Dead Space late last year.Ĭentral to Schofield’s complaint is a lone score of 65 that caused the Xbox 360 version of Dead Space’s aggregate Metacritic score to drop one point from 90 to 89.
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