Metacritic is a site that needs almost no introduction in this day and age. It’s a website that allows critics and fans of various media to review products and talk about them. The way the website works is that these grouped scores are separated, and they’re represented as User and Critic scores. That separation is why we’re here today. Recent conduct by users on Metacritic is why they’ve made a rather significant change to their review posting. Let’s discuss why these changes happen and what they could mean for future titles on the website.
The New Review Process
Let’s not mince words; Metacritic’s now added a 36-hour timer for users to wait before they can review games. What this means exactly is that for the first day and a half of a game’s public release, users cannot review it. While it seems like this can be good for cleaning up some nasty review bombing habits, it seems counterproductive to users who don’t do that.
In a way, it’s both a form of time-limited censorship and potential damage control versus people who are unsatisfied on the internet. The reason that’s the chosen wording is that review-bombing is a very crude way of voicing disdain towards a certain topic. For instance, The Last Of Us Part II had a review bombing problem just last month. Lots of those reviews were posted mere minutes after the game went live digitally.
Things have since evened out, but at the time, of the 75,000 user reviews, over 40,000 of them were negative. Clearly, there seemed to be a problem here, so Metacritic decided to make a change to limit such negative outcry in the future. Not to mention, it is a supposed countermeasure against people who don’t own the game. Now, whether or not it’s an effective measure is up in the air. But, we’ll update this story as it develops in the future.