Guess the game's metacritic Critic/Reviewer score after 2 weeks of release

.... pfffffffffffff .... hahahahahahahhaaaaa ...AHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA ....

That is incorrect. I know there have been incidents where a studio has directly lost profits or have been shutdown based on metacritic scores, however I expect more people overall have lost more jobs because the game didn't reach the desired profit margins which metacritic, as an advertising platform, sadly has a lot of say in. If we want to go the tin foil hat route we could even point out how the devs already kind of said the team is going to "shrink" post release, which is slightly off in the context they mentioned it in.

I agree with your sentiment, however I believe you, like many others (including myself at one point) probably don't fully grasp how you are using metacritic or how other people are using metacritic. I'm sure your idea of "using metacritic" as being limited to "going to the metacritic" site, which sadly is probably not the bulk of metacritic's influence, especially past say the first month of release.

Disclaimer: the following lists may use I and you in it but that's only for lack of better wording and isn't really referring to anyone in particular.

In general most people would love to claim, and often imply the following, though their choice of words:

• I look at every game out there (lt. everything there is)
• I play every demo of a game before buying
• I give every game at least an hour
• I explore every mechanic/story parts before making a decision
• I do not only pick one game over another based on graphics
• I do not prioritize games based on score
• I do not prioritize games on release date
• I do biased towards certain genres and tropes in those genres
• I am not influenced by what other people say
• I am not influenced by advertising
• I am not influenced by francise-syndrome
• I read only review like content that is accurate, unbiased, unpersonal and offers a deep wealth of technical information on the game (note to TB fans: technical =/= game options, as you've been brainwashed into thinking)
• I do not judge based on first impressions or blind review-like content
• I do not base my opinion on cynical/sarcastic/humorous reviews or some other theatrical performances
• I don't preorder games unless I've had a taste of the game before the preorder or seen very exhaustiv looks into the game prior, and I stand to gain benefits by preordering

The truth is more like this:

• you stumble upon or hear about games from your friends
• you find a lot of games in sales
• you find a lot of games when they're highlighted by steam on the first page
• you find a lot of games because some people on the internet have made videos where they've dramatizied themselves enjoying the game or hating the game, etc
• you prioritize games that are in the same genre or franchise; ie. like what you know, hate what you dont
• when faced with a list of games, you use the score, date, name, picture and whatever else but actual gameplay to judge if you're even going to LOOK at a game (ie. search for gameplay, etc)
• you don't like reading reviews, especially long ones, so you specifically look for "review like" content that is extremely personal or personalized (ie. subjective and not serious) and like things such as "first impressions" or other impromptu over-dramatized "show" content that is not necessarily representative of what your experience playing the game would be
• you especially like sarcastic/humorous reviews (eg. Zero Punctuation) and don't really think too much on their influence on your opinion of the game in question; in the situation where you watch them first before even experiencing the game for yourself
• you don't really bother with demos unless they're analogous to show room demos and presented weeks/months in advance

To put this into visual perspective, let's say you're of the group that's "I don't go to metacritic therefore I'm doing it right," how often do you look at a search in steam and focus on these when you prioritize? Do you think the little number on the right is from steam reviews?



Most people don't even know of "metacritic" even though it's in the actual steam page very clearly,



Actually making decisions on the metacritic rating is somewhat of an inflated inaccurate argument, what really happens is that metacritic is influential in marketing so a user searching or stumbling on a page may check it or notice it and intentionally or subconsciously write the game off and proceed to do something else. This is made worse by the fact a lot of people won't say use the web steam client but the one they have on their system which say on windows is little more then ie6 with no tab support so you are actually forced into a singleton choice with very little "readlater" functionality to it.

Sadly ignorance is not bliss in the marketing world. You can make the greatest product ever, if you can't market it, then you'll probably see it flop; especially if you were looking for return on investment in the near future. Not everything out there can wait 2-3 years to naturally become popular enough in the general public that it gets natural advertising.

Also talking and not talking about metacritic at this point is the same as "not voting" in an election because you think that makes a difference; it doesn't. You can't deal with what are essentially anologous to political problems by doing nothing.

That being said this thread is just a little analysis on how the game might do. And of course so people so people can boast their future reading skills.

I've stopped listening to anything totalbuiscuit has to say since it's all just self centered youtube-vlog divel and frankly as someone that has simultaneously had many computers of varying performance with a variety of screens I've found his self proclaimed informed optinion on the option menus and peroformance options to be borderline totalnonsense.

Among the many dumb things he misses: he bitches about lack of options in games that actually look and work as good on a higher end rig as they do on a low end one, he completely ignores the options on sidescrollers even though MOST of them actually run monkey balls even on a system with i3/i7 4g of ram and dedicated video card, his attention to details is so great that he also bitches of texture in games where it doesnt matter, dosn't bitch about them in games that don't, he has no idea what he's even talking about when he starts talking about engines, how games work and so on. How should I put this, he is one of those people that guesses everything but doesn't really tell you he's guessing and even glorifies his "guesses."

Not to mention that even for the time I followed him, he's repetitive and takes 40min to say anything; given how all his content is scripted I wouldn't be surprised if he copy/pastes a lot of it. Unless he's changed slightly, I expect he'll spend 15min talking about the options menu and giving his "very valuable" 120hz/dual-titan user "how an option menu needs to look" to run on low end systems" (sarcasm), praise the graphics, then bitch about the graphics, bitch about gameplay, bitch about the textures and copy/paste one of his previous rants on early access then go on a tangent about his youtube career and kickstarter.

My guess is they are aiming at the fans of the game who are only going to pay for it has the so called "release" label on it. It's also in their interest to get into the "released kids" market before the kickstarter bubble deflates even more; this way they distance themselves from any drama as other projects promised one or so years ago start to "fail to deliver" or get the infamous "delayed." They're already not getting any more good will from the whole kickstarter then they already have and seeing as they're part of the bigger kickstarter fiascoes such as "80$ demo on steam" and such, its highly favorable they create a barier between them "then" and them "now" to help sway other potential buyers into the franchise and put a lot of negative publicity into the past.

There are other nuances to it as well,

• by going into release they feed into the "shopping" habits of many people; for example you might not buy a product on a street even if the inventor along with a mob of scientists tries to sell it to you, but you're more then happy to pay 10x as much if you go into a shopping mall or seen it on tv just because you have things like "entering a shopping mall" trigger your "shopping mode" as it were
• they can sell you DLC such as commanders
• they can start profiting from mods; since pre-release mods don't really add to the game's reputation as post release mods
• they can sell you "expansions" and/or split up some other part of the game into a "planetary annihilation 2" instead of actually adding it to the current game
• they can safely charge you more, since as mentioned earlier you're more happy to pay 60$ for a game called "complete" then a game called "beta" even if nothing else changes between the two other then the name

This are just my assumtions. There's possibly other reasons, but that's what I see as the main motivation Uber probably has at the moment. Most of my speculation does seem to coincide with the idea that "metacritic doesn't matter" since though the kickstarter venture they've already gained enough public visibility where it actually doesn't matter, or at least not as much, in the short term.

i disagree not "voting" as in simply not rating or using metacritic in anyway would make it powerless but as long poeple willingly use it this will not be the case ...
for gods sake moralybankrupt developers use it to post glorius posts of bs to advertise their abysmal wreck they call a game ... guise of the wolf and garys incident should be a warning example ....

as for tb ... what one things about him is rather subjektive .. i took him into the post because i think he has a very valid way in criticising something that i would like to see done by more critics
no one is realy save from becoming repetitiv in some way or the other nor missing stuff .... they too are just people afterall
that is why you never focus one particular critic
i myself dont .. instead go read many reviews, critics, watch videos
read usercritic get your average out of it and decide
it shouldnt be the guy who critics to matter but the critics to the product themselves

Thanks for your answers.

I get it that you do not like how Totalbiscuit makes his reviews. Anyone else you prefer instead?

The part where you say *they can sell you "expansions" and/or split up some other part of the game into a "planetary annihilation 2" instead of actually adding it to the current game* worries me for the most.

Are you saying that we may see the missing assets of the game coming as "expansion" or delayed until PA2? I feared that a month ago, and the Community blasted me

Gaming journalists use it to gain visibility. The sad truth is that if you're a gaming journalist you have to use it since Steam promotes it! Not using it is basically just not getting promotion and others that are using it growing while you stagnate. Metacritic is also insidious in that even if you use a "more reasonable system" they will aggreagate it into their #/100 system.

Just in case there was some confusion. The user reviews don't actually matter, this thread is about the "Critic reviews" as they call them which are scores given by journalists and which are what Steam shows among others.

It's possible you'll see Uber try to distance themselves from the responsibilities of kickstarter. Essentially once they go release any hold as "backers" you may have will all be nulled or nonexistent and most of the minor features that are not yet in the game can be promised to at a later date and relegated to the "smaller team" and/or canceled under "didn't work out" as things like the unit canon; unlike now where they have to either "soon" or "later" and appropriate excuses be made which may make the devs unfortable.

This is favorable to them from both a business sense and the development sense, since the agile way is evolutionary and the kickstarter way is a process based, the two don't mix very well as you can see from the translation of the original preview to the current implementation.

I would say if you have some of those "doom and gloom" thoughts to hold your breath until some time after the release "stage" has subsided and see if the devs have used it as a way of getting development into a more natural progression with out silly kickstarter promises to worry about, or have treated it as a "final stage" in development and moved on. Since it can go both ways. You should be able to tell by variation in development and updates post-release.

I hate the game industry of today that are all trying to do the same and make (annual) sequels like COD, BF4, FIFA, AC, GTA C&C, and the list go's on and on. Those games get review grades between 8-10.

I like PA because it's refreshing and a step forward in the RTS game industry. Uber is really trying new things with this game. I don't like game company's that are doing the same old **** every year and makes hundreds of millions with it! The moment a company is making a sequel that is playing exactly like the game before i wont buy it any more, like BF3 -> BF4. To bad repetition pays of if you look at COD

I support innovation not repetition! I hope PA will be reviewed with that in mind!

(why does this forum not have a private message system; oh well)

I just ask people I know that have had hands on experience specific questions on things I have doubts on. It's somewhat important to me that I get answers to my questions and not "answers to questions I didn't have" which the whole journalistic thing. I do also try to ask people I know spend 50-100+ hours in games I consider similar not just some youtube yahoo that claims to be everyone's friend.

Other then that I simply watch a lot of podcast content (must have 3-4+ people on it minimum!) to get into the know about games existing. The multi-person conversation system of podcasts tends to dilute the bias that plagues "individuality" in vlog like reviews that are things like WTF is; podcasts that actually bring random guests each week or vary the hosts are almost always better. Also podcasts don't have scripted "conversations" beyond having a list of things to talk about (because it's stupidly hard to do =P unlike reading from a script), and it's somewhat hard to say "ramble for 40min". Case to point, totalbuiscuit hosts this thing called the Polaris podcast that I listen to in the absence of, I guess almost any other podcast, aside from bitching to his guests totalbuiscuit barely talks let alone go on one of his usual 40min preaching to the choir.

That being said a lot of multi-person first impression content, such as Giant Bomb's quick looks (which are usually 2 people) don't really have the dynamism of equivalent podcast discussions since they generally go along the lines of one person talking after having played it and the other person playing the role of a sound board: "Uh huh" "Ya" "OH" "Ugh" For better or worse I do still occasionally watch giantbomb's quicklooks in the absence of podcasts talking about it or any good quality lets plays of it, and other options.

But I guess you asked for specifics so lets see, a lot of podcasts I listen generally mix talking about games with talking about other random stuff, and I've dropped and picked up podcasts as they became stale or nonstale. Out of the specifically gaming podcasts: idle thumbs, 8-4, both of which are hosted by people that have contributed to game development in their lifetime and know so probably will at least hold back in saying something inaccurate or really dumb; unlike everyone else. You then have more of the "down to earth" podcasts like rooster teeth's podcasts (the patch I believe is the only specifically gaming one though). You then have the whole "reviewer variety" such as things like the videogamer uk podcast and occasionally skimming though the giantbombcast when they're actually talking about games. And of course at the bottom of the barrel you have the lets players podcasts like the polaris podcast. This of course aside from other podcasts I listen to that only occasionally talk about video games.

But like I said the easiest way is to just ask someone for answers to the questions I have on something, since what's important for me when buying something is if I will enjoy it not if say a youtube-whatever celebrity enjoyed it. Even if there's nobody I know that has it on steam, it's not particularly hard to just find a stream and start a conversation about the game to get the answers I'm looking for. If all else fails go to a lets play and skim though it until I find the answers; youtube is pretty good at this since it usually has the little preview on seek so you can just jump around fairly efficiently. I try to avoid actually seriously watching the lets play if I'm actually interested in the game though.

It does.

@nightbasilisk
weither you enjoy a game or not you wont know by gathering information ... stuff might be enjoyable in theory but in practice were you actualy play the game there may come up other stuff that might lower your enjoyment or outright kill it ...

I know. That's why I said the main way I find out about a game is by asking people questions. The things I ask are tells I've come to discover about myself over the years on what works and what doesn't, for me.

I am all for trying the unknown as it were, so long as I think the "unknown" is of good quality and I'm not just gonna get myself burned on an entire genre because of it. Games like Europa Universalis comes to mind, which is interesting to play, so long as I'm in the right mood for it, hence I ask a lot more questions when it comes to games of similar type then I ask of say a platformer.