Metacritic decides to axe developer ratings

Metacritic had plans to begin assigning scores to developers, but these plans have since been cancelled.

According to Metacritic co-founder and games editor Marc Doyle, the firm has decided not to implement developer scores on the site because developer resumes are not as detailed as the site would like, and also because it believes the games industry doesn’t credit staff on projects the way it should. The site will still build a database of developers, but will not be assigning them ratings or scores.

Doyle said “we have no plans to bring [developer ratings] back. Right now we just want to see if we can build the database, take a shot at it, see what we can do.”

“If [developers] worked on 30 games and we can only show four and then we take on this score, which is really just an average of those games in our database for them, then that’s not fair. We discussed it as a team and it made sense to just drop that overall number whilst still trying to build this database which will be difficult, but we’re going to give it a shot. It’s needless to put that number on it though.”

Scores for individual developers have been live since last summer, but the addition was only recently noticed by developers. Some complained details regarding their development history was not included, or Metacritic didn’t cite specific releases.

“We’ve found it very tough in some cases to say who has been responsible for a game,” admitted Doyle. “I think that is an issue, of the industry not needing or not wanting to put that information out there. I don’t know exactly what’s behind that, I haven’t discussed that with too many publishers.”

“If by this issue coming about in the last week all of a sudden the publishers and developers are like: ‘Yes, let’s standardise this whole system’, and everyone wanted to go out there and in every game attach their credits, then we could hire someone to simply input that into our system. But… I don’t necessarily see that happening and I don’t think you see that happening.”

“That’s ultimately the goal of Metacritic: What should I watch, what should I play? Not necessarily to fuel some larger discussion over what person is more worthy than some other person.”

If it prevents people from incorrectly judging developers, then a lack of developer ratings can only be a good thing.

Thanks to VG247 for the info.