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I am from the future. I am a Robotic Categorization and Aggregation Unit. My designation is 4A539. I have come to rate your overall quality as a human being. Please submit yourself for review.
[Update: Metacritic has yanked the developer ratings, though they still list the scores for each of a developer's games. The information is still there, but it's no longer automatically averaged for Metacritic users. Bust out a calculator, and rate your favorite developers for yourself!]
Metacritic, the website that is the bane of many professionals in the video-game industry, now has one more thing to make people nervous: It's begun rating the back catalogues of individual developers.
Type a well-known developer's name into Metacritic's handy search bar, and you'll see a profile with all of the person's work, how their games have scored, and a list of all their average scores from which you can theoretically infer an individual's overall success. Of course, we're working with averages here, so not all the scores seem to tally up how you think they would.
For example, I tried searching Denis Dyack. Dyack's reaction to the mixed reviews of his last game, Too Human, was a bit of a debacle. His profile only lists three titles and their scores: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and Too Human. This is odd because he created the Legacy of Kain series, which doesn't have a score. As it stands, he's got a couple nice, green numbers, with only Too Human reflecting poorly on his body of work. But if you search someone as prolific as Shigeru Miyamoto, you'll see a profile that is much more colorful. Some of the entries list him as a "General Producer," which makes one wonder how involved he could have been in two titles released less than a month apart.
Many industry insiders express some hesitation about Metacritic and believe in more elaborate and comprehensive ways of talking about video games. They explore questions like who the developer geared the experience toward or how tip-top presentation can work to cover up a few glaring mechanical problems. Metacritic is only interested in cold, hard numbers, and that sometimes creates problems for reviewers who use different scales. 1UP, for example, uses a grade-school letter system for the sake of clarity. Meanwhile, in EGM, a "5" is average, but in Game Informer, a "7" is average.
Personally, I think it sounds like Metacritic is on its way on categorizing everything like some sort of hyper-efficient, humorless, bureaucratic automaton. Hopefully, in a few years time, I'll be able to find out whether or not my morning toast is an irresistibly delectable "87" or a bland, boring "62."
What do you think of Metacritic's new rate-a-developer feature? Do you think aggregation works, or is it too reductive?
