I just finished reading a rather good article from VG24/7 quoting Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch about the state of Metacritic, and its affect on the sales of the game.

Saber recently just published Evil Dead: The Game, which has scored a somewhat middling 74 on Metacritic, and yet has been a hit on streaming platforms and already moved a half million units. And Karch has some words on Metacritic itself:

"The other thing we've learned is that the days of a Metacritic score determining how well a game sells are long gone."

He says that games are sold by social media, influencers and word-of-mouth buzz, rather than critical scores.

"Games are sold by the quality of the product itself, irrespective of how well the game performs. I can name games that scored 8s and 9s that, I can tell you, publishers wished they never released. It's nice to put a plaque on your wall, but if you can't afford the nail to hang the plaque, what's the point, right?"

This idea is a far cry from an industry that has, and perhaps still does at some studios, tie performance bonuses to Metacritic score averages, with the assumption that a better game means better sales. And while sometimes sure, that’s true, the industry has been reshaped in a lot of ways that has made Metacritic sometimes very right, sometimes very wrong, and often kind of pointless. None of this is a dig at the site at all, it’s just doing it’s job, compiling scores, and the controversy is around what both publishers and fans make of those scores.

Here are a few different scenario’s we’ve seen in addition to the Evil Dead example:

And yet, not everyone is Saber Interactive. Here’s SEGA, talking about target scores and sales correlation for the upcoming Sonic Frontiers game:

“We have set internal targets, as the correlation between the scores of external evaluation organizations and sales is high in Europe and North America," Sega said.

“If the game gets a high score, it can become a must-buy game, and possibly generate synergy with sales, so we are currently working hard to improve the quality of the game toward its sales for the holiday season.”

Overall, I think Metacritic’s grip on the industry has lessened the last few years, but increasingly, it’s just more of a case by case basis with no magic link between score and success, depending on how the lifespan of a game unfolds.

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