GDC session by Adams Greenwood-Ericksen of Full Sail University titled “A Scientific Assessment of the Validity and Value of Metacritic” attempted to break down the tiers the site assigns to reviews in weighing them for its score average. Metacritic, for its part, was quick to dismiss the report.
“Today, the website Gamasutra ‘revealed’ the weights that we assign to each gaming publication (for the purpose of calculating our Metascores), based on a presentation given at the Game Developers Conference this morning,” Metacritic said in a statement. “There’s just one major problem with that: neither that site, nor the person giving the presentation, got those weights from us; rather, they are simply their best guesses based on research (the Gamasutra headline is misleading in this respect).”
“The disparity between tiers listed in the article is far more extreme than what we actually use on Metacritic,” it added. “For example, they suggest that the highest-weighted publications have their scores counted six times as much as the lowest-weighted publications in our Metascore formula. That isn’t anywhere close to reality; our publication weights are much closer together and have much less of an impact on the score calculation.”
