Meta-metacritic

Many of you may be aware of a lovely little enterprise called Metacritic. Essentially what they do is compile reviews from sites they feel are respectable and speak with a certain level of knowledge regarding their particular subject matter, and aggregate these reviews into a single Metascore. This theoretically averages out any individual biases to get a better feel for what the general concensus is on any particular medium (the one we would be interested in being, of course, video games). They’ve been doing this for some time, and this will not be new to many people. Many organizations use Metacritic as their main scoring mechanism (most notably, Steam). While this is all good and wonderful for figuring out what the best games are, or how good any given game is, I propose a ‘more different’ use of the data.

Convieniently, Metacritic has a giant list of every game they’ve got reviews for, on each platform. Each game on the list links to a page about that game, which contains various information, such as the developer, publisher, release date, ESRB rating, and so on. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be interesting to know what the best Development shop in the world is. For PC. For PS3. Overall. If you only count games made in the last 4 years. If you count all games ever. Best Developer of the 80s. Best Developer who makes Mature titles.

Want to mash up those names with MobyGames? Best Developer based in Canada. Best Game Designer.

I think it would be a project of academic interest, and as far as I can tell, nobody has ever tried to come up with who the best studios or game designers are based on anything but personal opinion. Arguably using Metascores is also personal opinion, but it’s averaged out personal opinion based on the final product of their labors rather than any emotional opinion about the studios themselves. I’ll post a link on here when my Proof of Concept is done, and feel free to send me a line if you have any ideas about neat uses for this information, or good ideas about how it should be done.