Suda 51 Says 'Everyone Cares Too Much About Metacritic Scores' | Push Square
Japanese video game industry legends Goichi «Suda 51» Suda and Shinji Mikami (of No More Heroes and Resident Evil fame, respectively) aren't huge fans of critical aggregator Metacritic. The storied developers think that the industry practice has a detrimental effect on creativity, which is another reason why video games have become increasingly safe in recent years.
The twosome sat down with GamesIndustry.biz to discuss the current state of games and why titles with a unique and more experimental nature are becoming lost in the churn, and Suda said: «Everybody pays too much attention to and cares too much about Metacritic scores. It's gotten to the point where there's almost a set formula – if you want to get a high Metacritic score, this is how you make the game. If you've got a game that doesn't fit into that formula, that marketability scope, it loses points on Metacritic.»
If you didn't know, Metacritic is a popular review aggregate site that began all the way back in 1999, being acquired by Wiki fan-site company Fandom in 2022. Fandom is a for-profit company created by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales in 2004.
To shed some further light on how it all works, rated outlets such as Push Square don't submit their reviews to Metacritic; instead, they are scraped from the internet once an embargo lifts and assigned extra weighting «because of their stature» in the industry. Metacritic flat-out refuses to reveal what additional weighting these special, chosen publications receive. Some studios and publishers only pay out bonuses to staff on achieving a certain Metacritic score, which is also obviously not great. Alternate aggregator OpenCritic purports to have fewer downsides than Metacritic but lacks the same brand recognition and broad acceptance to really catch on.
The Grasshopper Manufacture studio head says that his studio has fallen foul of this, but they try not to focus on it: «I don't care too much about the Metacritic numbers. I'm not really conscious of
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