I can remember back in the days when you would rush to your latest supermarket to pick up a copy of your favorite game magazine (I use to buy GamePro every month) to read up on the latest games. I would always skip to the reviews first to see what games deserved my money and which ones were better off at the bargain bin or rental. Back then, people had trust in the reviewers working for game magazines such as GamePro and EGM. Not sure what made people stop trusting reviewers but now there is one almighty source for you to see if the latest game is worth your time….Metacritic.
Ever since Metacritic appeared in 1999, they have been building up a mecca of which all game reviews gathered from the top game journalists to a small indie review site and are put into a unknown mathematical formula to come up with a score from 0 to 100. Now you might say that this is perfect. No more buying magazines or visiting your favorite site to see what they have to say about a game. You can just head on over to Metacritic and in seconds you have your answer if the game is worth your money.
I, for one, still consider reviews, previews, etc as personal opinions of the author who wrote it and nothing more. Just cause he or she hated or liked a game, doesn’t mean I will too. I tend to not care if they hate it or not but I look for the reason why they did and if it will affect my fun in playing that game. Having a quick place to look to see how the gaming journalists at large are liking or disliking a game is great. I will still go to the sites that I tend to trust for a deeper look at the game in question.
So I have to ask the inevitable question….does Metacritic influence your decision making in buying games? Or do you still rely on your favorite site/author to tell you like it is?
When i was young i recall the very first game mag i was purchased was the GamePro mag with the orange to yellow fade font and it had a futuristic cover of baseball where the bat looked like a light saber and the ball seemed like a laser beam being bent. the smell of the glossy untouched print is still fresh in my mind.i was never one to rely on recalling an author’s name for reviews because tastes are unique to the individual. i have a penchant for obscure games and sometimes non accepted titles but the majority of the public. artists were the only people i remember because the art kept me memorized on the cover alot! Atari had that skill down packed since the games back then required imagination, the box/cartridge art helped with the 2 part process of imagination of compiling graphics with illustrations. i will garner information from what a review has to say but in no way does a reviewer give me a warm and fuzzy if i’m curious. even renting games took effort because Blockbuster required utility bills to rent games w/o CC information. i somehow did that and visited BB to get a peak at imported copies of Final Fight with console rental options available when the PS1 (PSX) was around. now we live with information overflow and and home access marking the end of the print era we lived in. nostalgic, happy and sad at the same time, this article brought back memories of hitting comic book stores while they played black hole sun from soundgarden via radio waves before this “Ipod” came around and radio was acceptable.
Metacritic influences me, but so has any single reputable review with a rating. If a game doesn’t have an 80% rating or greater, it is highly unlikely that I’ll purchase it.
I’ve always looked at the score. Whether this was in the early days with PC Gamer (my mag of choice from ages 12-18), or later on with IGN and Gamespot, I’ve cared about how *good* the game was. The score seemed to be an index of this; a single measure of whether the reviewer thought the game was good enough to warrant his or her own purchase. 90+ and you knew that they had a great time, 70 or less and you knew they didn’t have such a wonderful time. With only so much cash to go around, I could never afford to go with anything less than the round, sexy figure of 80.
Ribo is the same way with Metacritic. It has to score a 85-90 or higher for him to buy it.
Metacritic just stopped me from picking up Frontlines: Fuel of War for $7.50 on Steam this afternoon. So yes, I guess it does effect my game purchases if I haven’t ever heard anything about the game before.
I actually bought that game on the 360 and have yet to play it. I think I got it for $20. Not sure why I bought it.
Because you didn’t read Metacritic?
Hahaha. If I did I wouldn’t have bought it. It was more of an impulse buy when I went shopping that day