10 Gaming Industry Secrets You Didn't Know
7. Employee Bonuses Can Depend On Metacritic Scores
There's no denying the importance of reviews in the gaming industry: given the higher price tag of a AAA video game compared to, say, a blockbuster movie, consumers are typically far more conscientious about checking reviews before purchasing.
And many players turn to Metacritic - effectively Rotten Tomatoes for video games - to check the aggregated review score for a game before buying in.
The mere monolithic number alone can not only influence how people spend their money, but also incite intense, emotional debates from fans, and so it's absolutely something publishers take seriously.
This is to the extent that some publishers even offer developers incentives for hitting certain review score milestones. Infamously, Fallout: New Vegas developers Obsidian Entertainment were denied a bonus of $1 million shared between the team by missing an 85 Metascore by a single point.
This becomes particularly problematic when you consider that reviews don't always have a bearing on a game's commercial success, and in the case of New Vegas, it achieved a staggering $300 million in revenue mere weeks after its release.
The importance of the Metascore has even extended to companies and individual employees needing to state their average Metascore across projects while bidding for new work, in turn allowing powerful publishers to leverage a lower score against them.
Unsurprisingly, this often results in developers trying less to deliver their own consistent vision and simply attempting to pander to the most praise-worthy elements often singled out in game reviews, whether these elements suit their project or not.
Though it isn't common for these incentive-driven agreements to be publicised, they've been going on for years behind closed doors and aren't likely to stop any time soon.