10 Things Everyone Hates About Modern Video Games

In much the same way that film fans obsess over the minutiae of Rotten Tomatoes scores, so too do gamers hang on that single, aggregated number assigned to a video game on Metacritic.

This isn't to say that the number can't be a useful guide when people want to determine whether a game's worth their money or not, but the fanatical fascination with the specific number often lurches into genuinely unsettling territory.

So much does this one number mean to some people that they won't even consider playing a game with a score lower than, say, 80, and because of the apparent importance of Metacritic scores, publishers buy into it too.

Almost a decade ago, it was famously reported that Fallout: New Vegas developers Obsidian Entertainment had a performance bonus tied to the game's Metacritic score, and because it missed the target score by just one point, the team missed out on a hefty extra pay packet.

There are surely many other unreported instances of such practises, underlining the industry's generally excessive, gross obsession with critical reception.