The Meta review board Metacritic has started to list individual game developers by game score rankings. Metacritic has listed prominent developers such as Peter Molyneux, Cliff Bleszinski and Ken Levine. The rankings are based upon scores from each developer’s titles and taken in the aggregate. The list shows the highest title from the individual, the lowest score and then the average of all total games.
Metacritic, owned by CBS, suggests any developers wishing to submit additions and changes to their accreditation can do so by submitting directly to GameFAQs (also owned by CBS, along with GameSpot).
Speaking to Gamasutra, several developers have voiced concern over the rankings, saying that only partial lists of games shipped have shown up thus far.
"Man, it's bad enough games are judged by Metacritic," stated one developer to Gamasutra. "Now I'm going to be, too?"
2 Comments
March 28, 2011
This really isn't fair. Metacritic and reviewers cannot weigh all the factors that went into the launch of a game and the marketplace it was designed to reach. This will greatly effect "work-for-hire"/ smaller houses who take pick up jobs to cover payroll while they craft their own IP.
March 28, 2011
I think it's important to ask, "What does this new ranking actually represent?" Even if the Metacritic developer rankings eventually include every credited game score, it is still a nearly worthless metric -- especially when a developer worked on games with hundreds of other developers. During my 15 years of games industry experience, I've discovered that game credits are positively correlated to a developer's degree of experience, and Metacritic scores are weakly correlated to a game's quality and sales, but I've found little correlation between a developer's quality/worth and the review scores of the games that they helped develop. Hopefully, no one will place any value in these developer rankings, but I fear some people will. Apparently, Metacritic finds some value in these rankings, even if just as a marketing gimmick.