I have to be honest, i'm a little skeptical of this idea. I really don't want to be because it encourages more people who are active with games to play the games and post reviews here and talk about the quality of the game in general which will increase intelligent discussion as we had all hoped for, but I think there may be a flaw in this.
For the gaming industry we predict on the basis of hype, precedent for previous versions or similar games in a particular genre, target market for the game, time of year for release, attachment rates, install base, reviews etc. i.e. we have a lot of things to take into account and that can be a lot of information at our disposal to make our predictions with the more info leading to more accurate predictions.
If we were to trade on metacritic scores we are essentially trading on what X number of people think of the game. This "target market" is miniscule compared to what we are used to trading on and therefore can vary in great degree. For e.g. in sales we can generalise that a certain proportion of the market like hardore games, platform games etc and are likely to buy said games. To get the same kind of info that I mentioned in the paragraph above, essentially we need to know who's reviewing the game in advance of the review and also we would need personal info of their favourite genres, games they bought, enjoyed, biases they may have in the console war, the mood they are in when playing the game, writing the review etc.
Without that, it is essentially guesswork because before a game is released and reviewed what info do we have? Hype and Content Releases from the game producers. If a reviewer is worth his salt then hype should not affect his review (but surely if hype wasn't taken into account then all reviews would post a score with little variance, but look at the range Lair got, 30-90), and content releases would show all aspects including faults in the game design, which they don't as they are essentially biased to build up hype for sales. So in essence all we are trading on is "is this game overhyped for what it is?" We can do this for sales based on the information at our disposal as I have said but, we are essentially trading blind on reviews.
I don't want to seem critical but I may be because I am tired at the moment and I would like others to come and point out things I may have missed here either for or against. Depending on the potential gains I see I will use this feature and if it turns out that it works and we are accurate in predicting game review scores then I will happily welcome it.
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For the gaming industry we predict on the basis of hype, precedent for previous versions or similar games in a particular genre, target market for the game, time of year for release, attachment rates, install base, reviews etc. i.e. we have a lot of things to take into account and that can be a lot of information at our disposal to make our predictions with the more info leading to more accurate predictions.
If we were to trade on metacritic scores we are essentially trading on what X number of people think of the game. This "target market" is miniscule compared to what we are used to trading on and therefore can vary in great degree. For e.g. in sales we can generalise that a certain proportion of the market like hardore games, platform games etc and are likely to buy said games. To get the same kind of info that I mentioned in the paragraph above, essentially we need to know who's reviewing the game in advance of the review and also we would need personal info of their favourite genres, games they bought, enjoyed, biases they may have in the console war, the mood they are in when playing the game, writing the review etc.
Without that, it is essentially guesswork because before a game is released and reviewed what info do we have? Hype and Content Releases from the game producers. If a reviewer is worth his salt then hype should not affect his review (but surely if hype wasn't taken into account then all reviews would post a score with little variance, but look at the range Lair got, 30-90), and content releases would show all aspects including faults in the game design, which they don't as they are essentially biased to build up hype for sales. So in essence all we are trading on is "is this game overhyped for what it is?" We can do this for sales based on the information at our disposal as I have said but, we are essentially trading blind on reviews.
I don't want to seem critical but I may be because I am tired at the moment and I would like others to come and point out things I may have missed here either for or against. Depending on the potential gains I see I will use this feature and if it turns out that it works and we are accurate in predicting game review scores then I will happily welcome it.