Goichi 'Suda51' Suda – of No More Heroes and Killer7 fame – thinks that focusing on Metacritic scores is bad for creativity. Speaking to GI.biz recently with survival horror genre producer Shinji Mikami, Suda expressed his frustrations with the review aggregator platform's cultural cache.
“Everyone pays so much attention and cares so 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.
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“If you have a game that doesn't fit that formula, that doesn't fit that scope of marketability, you're going to lose points on Metacritic. The bigger companies might not want to deal with that kind of thing. It might not be the main reason, but it's definitely one of the reasons. Everyone pays too much attention to the numbers.”
Mikami also spoke on the subject, saying that he believes that small and interesting games receive less attention, and that this is due to “the large number of big-budget games on the market and the effort spent on marketing them.”
“The types of games that get the most marketing support are the ones that need to appeal to as broad an audience as possible,” Mikami said. “More original games don't have the same marketability.”
These aren’t particularly new sentiments, of course — Metacritic’s dominance as the final word on a game’s quality has been routinely cited as an oppressive influence for some time now. There are a few famous cases of studios revoking bonuses for not reaching a certain threshold, most notably Destiny and Fallout: New Vegas. Writing for Kotaku over a decade ago, Jason Schreier examined the aggregator’s pernicious impact, saying, “Metacritic is a useful tool, but video game publishers have weaponized it.”
As a writer who is known to occasionally rate a game online, I have my own issues with Metacritic — specifically, how its reductive translation of stars into numbers tends to flatten out more nuance than review scores naturally do, sometimes inviting critics to be harassed for the unforgivable crime of simply saying that a game that audiences have already decided is a masterpiece is 'good.' Fairly or unfairly, 6/10 carries different connotations to three stars.
The conversation took place as part of a longer interview GI.biz conducted with the duo, in which they discussed Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered , a regular, clean-cut remaster of the 2011 third-person shooter. The interview also covered Zombie Rider , another ill-fated collaboration between the two that never saw the light of day.
“Maybe it wasn't bad enough,” Suda said of the game. “If it was a little worse, maybe Mikami would agree. But it wasn't anything to the level of 'what the hell is going on in this game?'”
Grasshopper was acquired by NetEase in 2021 and they are currently working on a new, as yet unannounced IP that they hinted at a bit last year.