EA Annoyed By Low Metacritic Scores
Right. So apparently, EA CEO John Riccitiello has complained about EA's scores on Metacritic.com, a Web site that tallies up reviews of movies, music, books and games to offer an average total score. The average score for an EA game has dropped from 77% to 72.%
“Our core game titles are accurately measured and summarized by these assessments, and that is a very big deal,” said Riccitello during a meeting with Wall Street analysts. “So this is perhaps, to me, the most important chart in this presentation, we need to recover here.”
Of course, Metacritic has its detractors, and Riccitiello himself shrugged off the site's influence by remarking, "You don’t cash Metacritic, you cash checks.” And the article also points out that a highly-regarded game like Okami earned a Metacritic average of 93%, but sold poorly, while licensed shovelware like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix topped the charts with an average score of 61%.
It's nice of EA to recognize that some of the games it's producing aren't getting great reviews, but if they're going to continue publishing licensed games like Harry Potter and sports franchises like Madden that are gonna sell regardless of what a site like Metacritic says, are they really that likely to change their ways?
Declining Metacritic Scores Irk EA Boss [The Tech Herald]
Wootini
Posted to Video Games on 22 February 2008
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: ea, electronic arts, metacritic, reviews
I hope EA realises that the way to increase their average score isn't to buy advertisement space or to offer larger PR bonuses, but to just make better games.