Raphael Colantonio, founder of Arkane Studios and co-creator of the Dishonored series, has spoken out against Metacritic's scoring system. According to the developer, the industry's obsession with average scores forces studios to create simpler, less ambitious games, while more complex projects—those requiring longer development time for polish—often go underappreciated.
The Metacritic ecosystem encourages devs to make safe boring games. As long as a game is polished at launch, you're guaranteed a 80%, no matter how boring the game might be. Meanwhile S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 gets a 73 because it's a bit rough on the edges at launch. Unfair, misleading..
It encourage devs to play it safe by making easy games that are easier to polish. As soon as you offer games with tons of possibilities, you open yourself to a harder game to polish at launch.
Colantonio also criticized the inability to revise scores on Metacritic, arguing that this prevents the platform from accurately reflecting a game's true quality, unlike Steam's dynamic review system.
70% on metacritic can either mean it's a mediocre game or it's an amazing game that has bugs at launch and needs patching. I don't think Metacritic helps in making the difference between the 2.
A bad game with no bug has better score than a great game with bugs. Makes sense to you? It means the essence of the game is not taken into consideration, it means that 3 months later, when the great game is patched, it still has shit score. Makes sense to you?
Currently, Raphael Colantonio and his studio WolfEye are working on an RPG set in an alternate 20th-century America. Early screenshots of the project can be viewed here.