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Metacritic weighting report rubbished

Study declared "wholly inaccurate" in statement.

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A study conducted by Full Sail University that aimed to shed light on Metacritic's weighting system has been refuted by the aggregation website.

Originally published by Gamasutra after a presentation at this year's GDC, the report by Adams Greenwood-Ericksen and his students was quickly challenged, with Metacritic posting a response on Facebook describing their findings as "guesses" that are "wildly, wholly inaccurate".

The report highlighted a six-tier model, that suggested that some media outlet's review scores are given significant weight when compared to others. Whilst Greenwood-Ericksen claims his findings are "almost entirely accurate," Metacritic begs to differ, as you can see from the full statement below:

Today, the website Gamasutra "revealed" the weights that we assign to each gaming publication (for the purpose of calculating our Metascores), based on a presentation given at the Game Developers Conference this morning. There's just one major problem with that: neither that site, nor the person giving the presentation, got those weights from us; rather, they are simply their best guesses based on research (the Gamasutra headline is misleading in this respect).

And here's the most important thing: their guesses are wildly, wholly inaccurate. Among other things:

* We use far fewer tiers than listed in the article.

* The disparity between tiers listed in the article is far more extreme than what we actually use on Metacritic. For example, they suggest that the highest-weighted publications have their scores counted six times as much as the lowest-weighted publications in our Metascore formula. That isn't anywhere close to reality; our publication weights are much closer together and have much less of an impact on the score calculation.

* Last but definitely not least: Our placement of publications in each tier differs from what is displayed in the article. The article overvalues some publications and undervalues others (while ignoring others altogether), sometimes comically so. (In addition, our weights are periodically adjusted as needed if, over time, a publication demonstrates an increase or decrease in overall quality.)

Metacritic weighting report rubbished


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