Gamasutra reported Take Two Interactive’s CEO, Strauss Zelnick said in a Wedbush Morgan Securities business conference that metacritic scores are a very important indicator to the success of a product. He added that “In fact, if your ratings go below a certain level, it can really hurt your ability to sell the title, and above a certain level can make a real difference in your success”. This is true only to a certain extent. There are some exceptions to this. And using metacritic as a barometer for quality is a inaccurate. Who is writing the review? Who is giving the game great reviews? What are they actually saying?
He further adds “Our ability to have high scores over and over and over again is a huge competitive advantage, and that advantage drives sales, it reduces risk and creates profits.”. What about making great games? I feel some of these execs forget the core idea of any business. Make good products your consumers would want to buy. It frightens me to know that there are companies out there that base their staffs bonus based on metacritic scores and are making business decisions based on it.
We at Malaysian Gamer do not give review scores because we feel we don’t need some arbitrary score(which doesn’t say anything about the game) to express what we think about it. Games aren’t like a regular product or a car. You can’t assess different components(although many sites do) of a game if we are going to look at games as an experience or an art form. Games are extremely subjective. As people say, to each his own.
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