Declining Metacritic scores irk EA boss

by Stevie Smith - Feb 22 2008, 18:57

John Riccitiello, CEO of third-party videogame publisher Electronic Arts, has this week voiced his displeasure at the company’s falling review average on influential media aggregation Web site Metacritic.com.

According to Metacritic’s pooling of EA’s releases over the last year, the average review score has fallen from 77 to 72 revealed Riccitiello before outlining his concern in relation to the performance of EA’s software.

“Our core game titles are accurately measured and summarized by these assessments, and that is a very big deal,” said Riccitello during a meeting with Wall Street analysts. “So this is perhaps, to me, the most important chart in this presentation, we need to recover here.”

Formed in 2001, Metacritic originally started as a movie review aggregator to help the public get a better sense of critical feedback on a release before booking their tickets or heading to the DVD store. It has since expanded to cover music, books, and videogames, garnering most of its traffic from the latter.

“For a movie it's going to cost you $10 to $12 bucks and it's a two-hour investment of your time. Whether critics like it is not a huge deal,” outlined Metacritic co-founder Marc Doyle in a Reuters report. “But a game costs $60 and 20 to 30 hours of your life, so you want to know ahead of time whether a game is good.”

While Riccitiello’s desire to see EA improve its overall scores on Metacritic indicates the weight the online aggregation site carries in the $18 billion USD videogames industry, Metacritic isn’t without its own critics.

Doyle explains that videogame publishers have been known to display a degree of dissatisfaction at the posting of review scores from critics they believe to be inappropriate.

For example, a publication based in the UK could be targeted for providing a low review on a Madden NFL game, with complaints centring on: “How are they qualified to review [American] football?”

Metacritic’s score system is also weighted so that perhaps less renowned print publications or online magazines Doyle sees as directly suited to the material they are reviewing are included on the site’s pages, while more notably heavyweight but non-specific publications are not.

Therefore, when assessing a game’s aggregate review score on Metacritic, visitors are far more likely to see critical feedback and review scores pooled from the likes of modest gaming publications such as Play.tm while the likes of the New York Post will not necessarily have a say in the title’s average score.

Although clearly focused on lifting the critical perception of EA’s brands through the power of Metacritic, Riccitiello is also aware that review scores do not often decide the success of a videogame title, offering that: “You don’t cash Metacritic, you cash cheques.”

And that’s a fair point. Metacritic may well have some credibility with the game-buying public but great scores do not guarantee retail success.

For instance, Capcom’s Okami exists as a prime example of a PlayStation 2 game widely lauded by critics and all-but ignored by consumers, despite its Metacritic average of 93%.

Conversely, EA’s own Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on PlayStation 2 is saddled with a Metacritic score of just 61% but still managed to make its mark at the top of the charts in 2007.

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