And we hit the ground running…

I’m going to be spending a good amount of time talking about Video Game Scoring trends using the industry standard Metacritic.  Before I actually start slicing and dicing the data, I’d like to take a step back and sort of defend Metacritic as a scoring index source. 

I deal with this stuff all the time, and frankly, I can model whichever data source the industry has adopted.  Still, there are those who critique Metacritic and they deserve my time as well.  With that in mind, I’ll be presenting a few videos which challenge the integrity of Metacritic, as well as diving into how their weighting system really effects the scores.  We’ll also get some insight in regard to how the weighting has effected the scores over the years.

Most reports available only show trends as it relates to the basic game meta data, i.e. Metacritic score, genre, date released, ESRB, etc. which we refer to as a “shallow dive.”  This “shallow dive” can incorporate this meta data for up to the 7,900 game titles (divided by platform) on Metacritic.   Our modeling application can also show various trends as it relates to the contributing outlets as well, for example, determining possible media bias. 

One example of a “deep dive” will apply to our analysis of the weighting system.  To do this, we’ll have to compare the Metacritic score to the actual non-weighted average of all the contributing media outlets for each title.  So if we have ten titles, each with 35 media reviews, that’s 350 data points.  That’s right, we have to average the scores for each title and compare it against the metacritic score.  Now, consider that we’ll present trends and comparisons from 2000 through 2008, and you can imagine the scope of the task.

So, lets get started!