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Goichi ‘Suda51’ Suda – of No More Heroes and Killer7 fame – reckons a focus on Metacritic scores is bad for creativity. Speaking to GI.biz recently alongside survival horror genre maker-upper Shinji Mikami, Suda expressed his frustrations with the review aggregator platform’s cultural cache.
“Everybody pays too much attention to and cares too much about Metacritic scores. It’s gotten to the point where there’s almost a set formula – if you want to get a high Metacritic score, this is how you make the game,” Suda51 told Gi.biz.
“If you’ve got a game that doesn’t fit into that formula, that marketability scope, it loses points on Metacritic. The bigger companies might not want to deal with that kind of thing. That might not be the main reason, but that’s certainly one reason why. Everyone cares too much about the numbers.”
Mikami chimed in too, adding that he believes that small, more interesting games get less attention “because of all the big budget games that are out there and all the power that’s put into the marketing for them.”
“The kind of games that get the most marketing support are the ones that need to appeal to as broad an audience as possible,” said Mikami. “More unique games don’t really have the same marketability.”
These are, of course, not especially new sentiments – Metacritic’s dominance as the last word on a game’s quality has been regularly called out as an oppressive influence for quite some time now. There’s been a few famous cases of bonuses being withheld from studios for not hitting a certain threshold, namely Destiny and Fallout: New Vegas. Writing for Kotaku over a decade ago, Jason Schreier explored the aggregator’s harmful influence, saying “Metacritic is a useful tool, but video game publishers have turned it into a weapon.”
As a writer who has occasionally been known to put a score on a game on the internet, I have my own issues with Metacritic – namely how its reductive translation of stars into numbers tends to flatten nuance even more than review scores naturally do anyway, sometimes inviting harassment on critics for the unforgivable crime of saying a game the audience has already decided is a masterpiece is simply ‘good’. Rightly or not, 6/10 carries different connotations to three stars.
The conversation came about as part of GI.biz’s longer interview with the two, where they discussed the upcoming Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered – a normal, regular remaster of the 2011 third-person shooter. The interview also covers another ill-fated collaboration between the two that never saw the light of day – Zombie Rider.
“Maybe it just wasn’t fucked up enough,” said Suda of the game. “If it was a bit more fucked up, maybe Mikami would have been into it. But it just didn’t have that level of ‘what the hell is going on in this game?'”
Grasshopper were bought by NetEase in 2021, and are currently working on a new, unannounced IP – which they teased a little of last year.