Infinite Loops

Soren Johnson gives “The Case for Metacritic”

Just read Soren Johnson’s blog post, The Case for Metacritic. I’m really glad there are some highly visible, vocal folks talking about this and not just going along with the current trend of spiting Metacritic.

I agree with Soren that even the mere fact that large publishers like EA are taking anything in addition to sales into account when judging how well they did is a good thing. I imagine that for EA, knowing what games they’ve made that were well-recieved critically but didn’t sell well is useful for several reasons:

• It may suggest that the game was mis-marketed or that its funding was undermarketed. Perhaps they’ll even think twice about releasing another Mirror’s Edge back-to-back with sure-thing blockbusters like Gears of War 2 (what percentage of holiday gift lists did they really think would put Edge ahead of Gears?).
• It may also help them understand what games to push for a sequel on despite disappointing sales.

What else? I don’t know. But at least publishers are starting to look beyond the scope of “let’s just make clones of games that have already sold well” in their decision-making processes. Three cheers for that!