A Tree Falling in the Forest

Metacritic is an intrinsically flawed concept based on a corrupt ecosystem. It would not be an issue of the game business, like film, music, television and everything else tracked by Metacritic ignored the numbers. I have never seen a film’s failure supported by a headline pointing to Metacritic. Nor have I seen the film press trumpeting the unthinkable number one position at the US box office of Battle: Los Angeles despite its score of 37 – a number which would get any game development executive fired. Why then, do all of the major game news outlets report THQ’s lost 26% of its market value yesterday because Homefront got a 71 – unless you look at the sidebar which says it got a 72, or PS3 which got a 75. Using this logic, we must also conclude the most recent add on DLC for Call of Duty: Black Ops did not sell well because it scored an anemic 78. and we should be stumped by Take Two’s decline despite the 88 achieved by Top Spin 4 on the same day as Homefront. Maybe this i...

This blog was originally a place for me to vent. After about a year, I found the same things making me angry, but I already wrote about them. I don't know whether that means I did not have many things to be angry about because all my buttons have been hit, or I am a very angry person and it took me a whole year to get it out. I certainly did not expect to change things - the blog is cathartic, so once it's out I have no compelling need to wright about publishers' mistreatment of developers, bad marketing, myopic product releases, used games, ratings, or parental responsibility - again. But every once in a while something so egregious comes along and, I just can't help being redundant. One of these things Metacritic's continued feigning of objectivity in the face of blatant bias. I wish I could say this particular rant is unique, but it's not. It is just something that set me off before and set me off again. I have written in detail about why Metacriti...

Last week I bought WET because it looked like fun and I wanted to play the game. After playing half way through the game I found it didn't only look like fun, but it delivered on its promise. It was what I wanted Stranglehold to be and what Gungrave never delivered. Lot's of mindless, shooting fun. Sometimes that's just what I want in a game. But apparently, most critics did not share my view. When I first looked on metacritic the score was in the deadly sixties, but has since moved up into the safe haven of mediocrity found in the seventies. Not quite green banded goodness, but not bearing the red mark of humiliation. I wish metacritic didn't matter, but unfortunately, developers' livelihood is based on this hopelessly useless , conflicted, arbitrary measurement system even though more and more and more people are realizing marketing and word of mouth are more significant factors in the purchasing decision than a Metacritic score. If you really wan...

I saw an article about Funny People, the Adam Sandler, Seth Rogan film opening this weekend and this line caught my eye (I added the emphasis) The film, which has a respectable 62 score on Metacritic.com, arrives a week after another R-rated comedy, Sony’s poorly reviewed “The Ugly Truth,” opened to a surprising $27 million. Do you think we would hear "respectable," "metacritic" and "62" the same sentence from a publisher or journalist? Then again why would we? The quote comes from Hollywood, Hollywood guys only care about money.

Honesty is such a lonely word. Everyone is so untrue. Honesty is hardly ever heard. And mostly what I need from you. (Billy Joel) Lara is back and I am happy. I have been playing Underworld since the release last week and think this is the best Tomb Raider since the first one. The environmental puzzles are great fun and not the too hard ones from later Tomb Raiders, the graphics are updated to exactly where they should be, and Lara's moves are updated and connecting me to Lara the way they did in the first one. She still shakes her head when I ask her to do something she doesn’t want to do, and I am duly impressed by the way she angrily brushes the side of her face when I rudely walk her into the foliage. Apparently, the critics don’t feel the same sense of nostalgia. Sure, bringing the identical Duke Nukem to Live Arcade justifies an 85, but roughly the same amount of time it took to build the Eiffel Tower to improve the experience and restore an icon justifies only the middl...

I really, really, really want to write something positive. There are a lot of good things about the game business, even in these times of layoffs and economic hardship. But I am more motivated to rant about things that really bug me than things that are going along swimmingly. One of these triggers just occurred in connection with Legendary, which in the interest of full disclosure, I helped to place with publishers . . . twice - that's another story. A couple weeks ago the folks at Spark Unlimited were happy see their hard work was being recognized in the September 2, 2008 preview on Eurogamer which said: Instead it focuses all of its resources into doing one thing: providing really good, entertaining, run-and-gun gaming. Stripping away the various complex systems and ideas which have accreted on the FPS genre since the days of Doom, Legendary instead focuses on using the power of modern hardware to increase its scale. In part, this means putting plenty of creatures (dozens, i...

Yes, I am still ranting about critics. The tension between creators and critics is as old as narrative itself. I'm confident Plato's critics were late comers to the process. But as we enter the season for release of highly anticipated, high production value, very expensive games the critics seem to be in a bad mood - or, the industry is releasing a string of the worst games in history. I don't think it's the latter because the games seem to be selling very well. Brothers in Arms is getting an equal number of scores 50s and 60s to its 90s. Fracture and Mercenaries 2 are faring even less well and I already talked about The Force Unleashed. The first reaction is to grab the critics by the lapels and scream "Have you ever tried to make a game?" I guess it's a common refrain across all creative media. Even though it would feel really good, let's take a look at the issue. There seems be a growing divide between what the critics are looking for ...

I started playing Star Wars: The Forced Unleashed this weekend. I am not a ridiculous fan who rushed out and bought it on the first day of release. I waited until the second day. My son and I sat down together, put the game in the console, and found comfort in the score’s familiar refrain. The game started, and continued, to deliver exactly what we expected. Of course, relative to Metacritic and other critics of the game, our expectations were somewhat low. We were only looking for fun. The game was not only consistent with the license, but provided a consistently high level of story and performance. In fact it was the first game I played in which the robots were infused with the same life and humor as those of the Star Wars films. Sure there were glitches in the game, but none of them significantly interrupted game play or stopped the fun. Again, the critics are jumping all over these, but lighten up fellas, we are dealing with complex software. When I watched the season ...

A couple weeks ago I wrote about latent and patent factors influencing Metacritic scores, but there is more to say.   I admit I am harping on Metacritic, but as Steven Totilo pointed out unfortunately, our industry has decided to be the first industry in the history of entertainment to focus on critical praise over dollars.  A developer's compensation and next job will be based on Metacritic scores.  If the movie business worked this way, there would be no career for those involved in the Sex and the City film, which scored a 52, and Adam Sandler would never have made another film after the revenue spewing behemoth "The Waterboy," which scored a 41. Forget about how silly our reliance sounds, forget about revenue, forget about how biased the reviewers are and forget the reviewers play more games in a week than most people play in a console cycle, give Metacritic and its subjective mystery system more power. I did write about a number of factors which could be biasing th...

It looks like Wall Street wasn't as excited by John Riccitiello's Jerry McGuire moment as I was. The stock is down over 10% since the announcement. The daily stock price is not the be all end all, and every CEO will tell you they do not let the stock price dictate corporate decisions, but stock hits make access to capital harder, making things like purchases of Take Two relatively more expensive. The decline is probably more attributable to the losses disclosed on last week's earning call, or the expiration of the Take Two tender offer, but the guidance of no quarterly guidance coupled with likely delays did not help. I say “likely delays” even though the company didn't he was very specific about products slipping from a quarter but staying in the fiscal year. Spore in the first quarter of 2009 would still be a fiscal 2008 release. The point I highlighted in the earlier post, was the commitment to quality against a backstop of the objectively measurable delive...