Eurogamer will no longer be listed on Metacritic

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Influential specialist games site Eurogamer is dropping review scores as they “don’t work any more”.

Games will no longer be scored out of ten, but some reviews will carry new Recommended, Essential and Avoid ratings.
This means Eurogamer’s reviews will no longer appear on aggregate site Metacritic, although searching for reviews on Google will turn up a simple 5 star system.

The site will only now review games from final retail code and online games will not be reviewed until after release, although it will still offer day-one early impressions.
“In the last few years in particular, the rise of digital distribution and the assumption that most consoles and all computers are connected to the internet has resulted in much more fluid game development,” wrote site editor Oli Welsh.
“Some games evolve right up to the moment of their commercial release, with a day one update. Some games are released commercially long before they are finished, via ‘early access’ versions. Some games never stop evolving.”
He added that online titles have changed the way games and their audiences interact in new and complicated ways.
“All of this has made the job of reviewing games much more unpredictable and complex. It has led to wildly varying review circumstances which challenge our ability to apply best practice. It has introduced new subtleties and variables to game performance and design which we need to assess.
“At Eurogamer, we relish challenges like this, and we’ve worked hard to stay ahead of the situation. But we have recently felt that our review policy and format was making staying consistent and providing you with useful context harder than it should be. We needed to fix that.”
Review scores no longer work for the readers or fairly represent the games, said Welsh.
“Scores are failing us, they’re failing you, and perhaps most importantly, they are failing to fairly represent the games themselves.”
To read the full blog post, head on over to Eurogamer.

Source: VG247

Good review scores are worthless. What kind of fucking retard just looks at the review score instead of reading the actual review? Only casuals and autists care about the review scores.

Nice.

Orion wrote:

Good review scores are worthless. What kind of fucking retard just looks at the review score instead of reading the actual review? Only casuals and autists care about the review scores.

IGN's fanbase in a nutshell.

Hopefully more people move away from scores.

Lol if reviewers actually adopt this then Metacritic will be out of business.

B-But now i actually have to READ the review. Can you imagine???

Awesome. This is a step in the right direction. Though I just think it makes sense to adopt a system that you accept isn't fluid and can't always be applicable years later. (A game that gets 90 in 2010 probably would be rated 80 in 2015, etc). And this system should be split up in sections; reviews for indies, reviews for AAA's and reviews for in-between/lower budget but not indie games. This way you can keep in account the criteria and obviously not rank them against each other.

I'd say most indies have been reviewed fairly in comparison to the AAA games, not many AAA games the last 2 years as good as Valiant Hearts.

Metacritic and review scores are “irrelevant” to Sniper Elite dev

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Review scores roll off Rebellion like water off a duck’s back, because its games sell strongly, turn profits, and make people happy.



Sniper Elite 3 launched in mid 2014 and received a range of review scores – but it also topped the charts and made a tidy profit for Rebellion thanks to its comparatively modest development budget.
In an interview GamesIndustry, CEO Jason Kingsley said the developer doesn’t much care about review scores, preferring to please its players.

“Nobody here ever bothers about Metacritic. We think of it as irrelevant, quite frankly,” he said.

“We only concentrate on what the users think, and every aggregate user score has been significantly higher than the aggregate professional score. We care about the people who are spending their money, and whether we’re happy that we’ve made a good game.

“The acid test isn’t somebody’s abstracted number.”

Kingsley went on to acknowledge the difficulties of professional reviewing, but said critics don’t necessarily feel the same about games as general consumers. It’s more valuable for Rebellion to get its games in front of players than critics.

“The greatest value for us as digital publishers, if you like, is in embracing YouTube and Twitch and the normal people being seen playing our games,” Kingsley said.

“It lets you see what the gameplay is like, and make a decision on whether you like that and want to play it. You might not actually care whether it didn’t seem totally original to one person, or that the story was a bit crap. That new approach has taken over.”

There’s been a lot of discussion about review scores recently; Eurogamer has just dropped them, for example. We’ve never been a fan of them here at VG247, but so many people find them compelling that we round up other people’s scores on the regular.

It’s an interesting debate; clearly there’s an audience for scores, but we could probably replace every review of a non-broken game with “your mileage may vary”.

Source: VG247