Metacritic has changed the way its user review system works for games, now it prevents people from adding their own ratings until more than a day after the launch of a title.
The change appears to have been first noticed by members of the ResetEra forums earlier this month. A post showed that the PlayStation 4 version of the standalone puzzle game Superliminal wasn’t open to user reviews until 12 p.m. PST on July 9, 2020, despite the game’s release on July 7.
Forbes confirmed this with a screenshot from Ghost of Tsushima’s review page from last week, which showed that user reviews were blocked until 12 p.m. PST on July 18, approximately 36 hours after its release on July 17th.
Both instances carry the message: “Please spend time playing the game.”
The change is believed to be a reaction to the continued use of user reviews as a form of protest by some consumers. Metacritical users have been known to post reviews on launch day, and sometimes even earlier, often with negative comments and scores to lower the user’s rating.
The most recent example was The Last of Us Part 2, exclusive to PS4, which has generated controversy among certain corners of the series’ fan base due to some of the story decisions made and the content of leaks that emerged earlier. of the game launch.
In the Forbes example, the user score was 3.4 out of 10 based on more than 5,000 comments, despite the critics’ average score of 95 out of 100. At the time of writing, the user score has increased slightly to 5.5 based on more than 130,000 user reviews.
Review-bombardment is a common form of protest on online gaming sites. Last year, Valve tried to avoid it on Steam by marking an avalanche of new negative reviews for the seven-year-old Borderlands 2 as an “off-topic review activity.”
The reviews followed complaints that Borderlands 3 would be temporarily exclusive to the Epic Games Store.
To update: Metacritic has responded to GamesIndustry.biz and confirmed the change, adding that it only applies to the gaming section and not to other forms of entertainment.
The company also said the decision was not made based on reactions to a particular game.
“We recently implemented the 36-hour waiting period for all user reviews in our games section to ensure that our players have time to play these games before writing their reviews,” said a spokesperson.
“This new waiting period for user reviews has been implemented in the Games section of Metacritic and was based on research based on data and with input from critics and industry experts.”
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