Metacritic

• 1. Introduction

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  Metacritic is an American website that can determine whether a game developer receives a bonus check or gets laid off. That is not a metaphor. In 2010, the studio Obsidian Entertainment finished Fallout: New Vegas to an average Metascore of 84 out of 100. The publisher Bethesda Softworks had set the bonus threshold at 85. One point separated the team from additional royalties. In 2011 and 2012, Obsidian went through a series of layoffs. The site was never designed to be a financial instrument wielded over workers. But that is what it became. How did a website built by three people in 1999 acquire that kind of gravity? The answers run through weighted averages, Webby Awards, review bombing, and a Wall Street analyst's chart.

• 2. Origins and Ownership

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  Marc Doyle, his sister Julie Doyle Roberts, and his University of Southern California law classmate Jason Dietz spent two years building Metacritic before its January 2001 launch. At the time, Rotten Tomatoes was already gathering movie reviews, but Doyle, Roberts, and Dietz saw room to cover a broader range of media: films, television, music, video games, and books. The site changed hands several times over the following two decades. CNET acquired it in 2005. CBS Corporation later bought CNET and Metacritic along with it. In 2020, Red Ventures purchased Metacritic and other CNET titles. Two years later, in 2022, Red Ventures sold Metacritic and a group of entertainment websites to Fandom, Inc.

• 3. How the Metascore Works

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  Every critic's review passes through a two-stage conversion before it counts. First, Metacritic turns each review into a percentage score, either by calculating it from a rating or by making a subjective judgment about the review's tone. Then the scores are adjusted before averaging. Certain publications receive more weight because of their stature, and a reviewer's popularity, reputation, and total number of reviews written all factor in. Metacritic has said it will not reveal the relative weight assigned to each reviewer. Games Editor Marc Doyle explained the core logic in a 2008 interview with The Guardian: because video games demand more time and money from buyers than music or movie tickets do, players are more invested in knowing whether an anticipated title will deliver. The site uses green, yellow, and red color coding to show the overall direction of critical opinion at a glance. For video games, the score bands run from universal acclaim at 90-100 down to overwhelming dislike at 0-19; films and television use a slightly different set of thresholds, with universal acclaim starting at 81. In June 2018, Metacritic introduced a Must-See label for films scoring 81 or higher with at least 15 professional reviews. In September 2018, a Must-Play certification followed for video games reaching 90 percent or above with a minimum of 15 industry reviews.

• 4. Wall Street and Sales Predictions

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  In 2007, Nick Wingfield of The Wall Street Journal wrote that Metacritic influences the sales of games and the stocks of video game publishers. Wingfield pointed to the higher cost of buying video games as the factor that makes review aggregation matter more to buyers than it does in music or film. Wall Street watched Metacritic and GameRankings because the sites posted scores before sales data were publicly available. Wingfield cited the rapid rise and fall in company values following the releases of BioShock and Spider-Man 3 as concrete examples. Marc Doyle described two major publishers that conducted comprehensive statistical surveys and found a correlation between high Metascores and stronger sales in certain genres. A growing number of businesses and financial analysts were using Metacritic as an early indicator of a game's potential sales and, by extension, a publisher's stock price. The counterpoint arrived in 2015, when a study analyzing more than 88 Xbox 360 games and 80 PS3 games from 2012 found that Metacritic scores did not actually drive sales. In 2008, John Riccitiello, then CEO of Electronic Arts, showed Wall Street analysts a chart tracking a downward trend in the average critical ratings of his company's games. That same year, Microsoft used Metacritic averages to decide which underperforming Xbox Live Arcade games to delist.

• 5. Scores, Criticism, and Gaming the System

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  Joe Dodson, a former editor at GameRevolution, argued that the site's conversion of all review systems into a single percentage scale produces scores that are misleadingly low. An A becomes 100, an F becomes zero, and a B-minus becomes 67. Doyle defended direct conversion, maintaining that every scale should map to a 0-to-100 range. A Washington Post review of Uncharted 4 was assigned a score of 40 out of 100, making it the sole negative review of the game. Readers petitioned Metacritic to strip the outlet of trusted-source status. Metacritic refused, and Doyle also stood by the site's policy of not updating scores, noting that many publications had faced pressure to raise review scores or remove reviews entirely to satisfy outside interests. Video game designer Raphael Colantonio objected on a different ground: patches can fix a game's technical problems after launch, publications can update their scores, but the Metascore stays frozen. He argued this pushed developers toward making safe, conservative games rather than ambitious ones. As a direct response to Metacritic's perceived pull on the industry, Kotaku and Eurogamer both dropped numerical review scores in favor of qualitative assessments. Publishers trying to influence the score from the other direction ran into Doyle's stated policy: once a publication is included, he will not remove any of its reviews at a publisher's request.

• 6. Review Bombing and User Scores

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  Signal Studios president and creative director Douglas Albright described Metacritic as having no standards after one of his studio's games was hit by a coordinated wave of negative user reviews. The site's user score system allowed people to create multiple throwaway accounts, known as sock puppet accounts, to flood a game's page with low ratings. In July 2020, Metacritic introduced a 36-hour waiting period before user reviews for newly launched video games could be posted. The measure was designed to slow the ability of organized groups to tank a score before a broader audience had played the game. Metacritic won two Webby Awards for excellence in the Guides/Ratings/Reviews category, in 2010 and 2015, a recognition that sat alongside the platform's most persistent problems.