Talk:Metacritic/Archive 1

Re: Why does this page exist?
While much of the content of this page probably does not belong on Wikipedia (someone delete it!), Metacritic is well-known enough that a page for it is probably appropriate. It shows up quite frequently in reputable sources, though admittedly this is more often as a quick reference to an entity's metascore than as part of an article about the site itself (check out Metacritic's news page to see this in action). Still, it's quite well known and has an Alexa ranking in the 5,000s. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.113.139.187 (talk • contribs) 23:58, August 2, 2007

External links modified
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 * Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20120124190447/http://www.next-gen.biz/features/exclusive-interview-ms-delist-xbla-titles to http://www.next-gen.biz/features/exclusive-interview-ms-delist-xbla-titles

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External links modified
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I have just modified 3 external links on Metacritic. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150928225241/http://www.metacritic.com/about-metascores to http://www.metacritic.com/about-metascores
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150928225241/http://www.metacritic.com/about-metascores to http://www.metacritic.com/about-metascores
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150928225241/http://www.metacritic.com/about-metascores to http://www.metacritic.com/about-metascores

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Redirect
I redirected the Metascore page here. The article had no useful information, and it was covered adequately here already. Stu  ’Bout ye!  09:27, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Why does this page exist?
The info is just a copy of what you can (easily) view on the Metacritic page... Sontra 20:36, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Untitled 1
Why does this page largely consist of copies of Metacritic content in the form of "top X list"s? Seems dumb to me; if people want to see them they'll go to the metacritic site itself. Sourcejedi 13:10, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Untitled 2
"Metacritic also gives bias to the reviews of magazines such as Rolling Stone, and hence reviews from these publications have a marginally greater influence on the average." I don't get that: the system is suppossed to be based on an average score from all the reviews, without favors for certain magazines or reviewers. --Joanberenguer 13:31, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Metacritic does indeed weight its scores. The New York Times is obviously going to get more weight than the Podunk Review. -- Jason Jones 12:10, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
 * It's not patently "obvious" that the reviews would be weighted, hence it's worth noting in the article. Pimlottc 14:00, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

About Metascore | emphasis added by me
The METASCORE is considered a  weighted average because we assign more   significance, or weight, to some critics and publications than we do   to others,  based on the overall stature and quality of those critics and publications. In addition, for music and movies, we also normalize the resulting scores (akin to "grading on a curve" in college), which prevents scores from clumping together. Rhe br 15:35, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Untitled 3
For the last two days, metacritic seems to be down? Are they still in business? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 145.100.15.197 (talk) 13:28, 2006 November 2 (UTC)

1999 or 2001?
The Wall Street Journal says Metacritic was launched in January 2001, but the article says it was founded in 1999 (I should note that a WHOIS lookup says the domain name was created July 16, 1999). Perhaps the site was created in 1999 but didn't go commercial until 2001? --Pixelface (talk) 11:45, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Criticism
I find the criticism against another review aggregation site largely baseless and to have it so directed at Rotten Tomatoes is odd, and the wording is probably subject to weasel words in that it fails to mention Metacritic tallies vastly fewer reviews overall versus Rotten Tomatoes. I'd like to change this, if anyone has suggestions I'd like to get a little less bias in the article. Revrant (talk) 00:38, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Changed without any bias, just the difference in score methods and number of reviews. Stabby Joe (talk) 19:59, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Metacritic and Books
I took out this paragraph for the time being: "Though Metacritic used to review books, following the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows their regular coverage of recently released books has ceased save for a small number of major releases."

In order to put back each section, we need references.


 * "Though Metacritic used to review books" - citation please (such as a reference as "though NNN got 4% at Metacritic, this reviewer likes her very much". Or a press release from Metacritic announcing the end of their book section. Etc)


 * "following the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" - too specific. Even if a reference backing this up can be found, I suggest we leave it out.


 * "their regular coverage of recently released books has ceased save for a small number of major releases." - in fact, I can't find a single book trace at their web site. There is no longer a section for books. Searching "harry potter" does not turn up any book review. I propose this is changed into "their coverage of books has ceased altogether".

This link suggests their book coverage began in 2005: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2999 I'm guessing the end of that coverage is quite recent (though by all means, find a reference).

In short, I propose we instead simply write "During 2005-2010 Metacritic also reviewed books."

Cheers, CapnZapp (talk) 19:25, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Critic Reviews Glitch...thing
Does anyone here think that the recent problem on MC with the individual critic reviews disappearing for no apparent reason should be mentioned in the article? 76.91.214.127 (talk) 18:11, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Metacritic main page and search engine are glitched
It seems that the main page for Metacritic is all glitched up! The score chart in the Main Page is all blank and not working, and worse, the search results never show up when I try typing in a word! When will Metacritic be fixed?! :( Here's a link for this page. --Angeldeb82 (talk) 16:24, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Just Game Metascores?
Why does this page only mention the range of Metascores a video game can have? What about movies and music? 64.228.214.125 (talk) 21:15, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
 * The scores for movies, TV show and music were added, in case if you were wondering. Hounder4  (Talk)  13:13, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

What is an "exclusive"?
The highest-rated exclusives table seems a little arbitrary. A number of these games are available on other platforms with minor changes or simple upgrades - for example, Metroid Prime is available within the trilogy on the Wii, Persona 4: Golden is an increment of a PS2 game, and Ocarina of Time is available on the Wii and 3DS. What's the criterion for inclusion? Tim (Xevious) (talk) 13:48, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

A couple item on section 2.2:

"Wingfield explains the influence of the website as coming from the higher cost to consumers of buying video games than for buying music or movie tickets." is highly editorial. The source article makes a flabby argument that a theater ticket costs $10, compared to games. Great factoid Wingfield, and how much does a videogame rental cost? See my point?

"One company [which] requires game publishers to pay higher royalties if they receive low scores on such sites" - that seems wrong, until you've realized the company in question is merely licensing its intellectual properties. Only, premium content owners have always dictated how their characters shall be used - this can hardly be connected to any impact that the more recently appearing review websites might have had.

The stock price correlation appears valid, but nevertheless, actual sales should affect the stock more than "apparent appeal" the latter being a basis for sales projections, only.

69.125.16.27 (talk) 18:44, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

A couple item on section 2.2, Influence
"Wingfield explains the influence of the website as coming from the higher cost to consumers of buying video games than for buying music or movie tickets." is highly editorial. The source article makes a flabby argument that a theater ticket costs $10, compared to games. Great factoid Wingfield, and how much does a videogame rental cost? See my point?

"One company [which] requires game publishers to pay higher royalties if they receive low scores on such sites" - that seems wrong, until you've realized the company in question is merely licensing its intellectual properties. Only, premium content owners have always dictated how their characters shall be used - this can hardly be connected to any impact that the more recently appearing review websites might have had.

The stock price correlation appears valid, but nevertheless, actual sales should affect the stock more than "apparent appeal" the latter being a basis for sales projections, only.

69.125.16.27 (talk) 18:44, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Criticism of game metascores
The article says "When a reviewer gives a game a rating of 'B-', Metacritic assigns it a value of 67—and many publishers, developers, and websurfers think that the score should be closer to 80." If you try to map a scale from A+ to F- to a scale from 0 to 100, while accumulating ratings of many different users of the scale, there is only one reasonable conversion: Linear. So you have A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, etc.. Thats in total 18 ratings. B- is the 12th, so you do 12/18 * 100 ~= 67. Purely linear math. This an absolutely scientifically correct decision to do a linear mapping, and the cricitism of that is pure emotion, without any objective reasoning. Please remove it.


 * That's assuming that negative/positive modifiers are worth the same as a full letter grade. It's also not the place of Wikipedia to decide if criticism is correct or incorrect. To do so would be bias and original research. 96.54.86.78 (talk) 17:57, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Bias toward gaming?
Metacritic aggregates scores for films and music, too. Is there a reason this article focuses so heavily on games? StemLongStem (talk) 20:44, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. Why does the article deal almost exclusively with a relatively small section of metacritic (game reviews), while virtually ignoring the other parts of the website? 66.131.197.203 (talk) 04:42, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

If might add to this discussion, games are hardly a "small section" of metacritic. Games are the main reason metacritic has any relevance at all, however flawed the scores they report maybe. CEOs, investors, and analysts all are known to consult metacritic for a variety of reasons. There is no record of this being done with film studios. Their music section is also increasingly irrelevant as the music industry continues to fall apart, never mind the fact that there are more albums released in a year than they could ever possibly cover. 71.192.96.16 (talk) 19:24, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, what? Gamers have gamerankings.com and have done for a long time. Metacritic is not essential for them. I would bet your right leg that most visitors are there for their TV, film or music scores. Besides, Metacritic scores are criticised more broadly than by gamers; you lot just happen to live on the internet. The only unique thing I can think of is those game dev contracts that depend on score thresholds. Just from glancing at the midsection of the article, I get the impression that much of its content is non-notable (or whatever the Wikipedia term for that is). Seriously, you think criticism of the site for banning users is important enough to be written up here? And I see ungrammatical gems like "Under recent years". Franknarf11 (talk) 03:04, 7 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Completely agree. This article is ridiculous. If this was all you'd read about metacritic you'd be under the impression it's a gaming website, which it just isn't.Wikiditm (talk) 22:25, 28 June 2015 (UTC)