Metacritic 2008 Platform Summary

Here’s the first set of reports in the series for our 2008 recap which will focus on Platforms. Our first chart simply breaks down the distribution of Game Titles by Platform:

The next chart denotes the average Metacritic score for each of the platforms:

As you’ll see from the chart below, there is a large percentage of game titles where Metacritic scores didn’t exist. This was largely due to Metacritics requirement that at least four media outlet reviews are required before a rating is applied, and the game title simply didn’t have the requisite reviews.

Also, the platform counts here reflect all “scored” and “non-scored” titles, while the MC Scoring Averages dismiss those without scores. In later sections of the summary, we’ll focus only on platform counts where scores have been applied.

What this report does is to take all the scoring data from 2008 and correlate it with Metcritics own favorability table which is located here. You can see from the following table how many titles fall within each favorability category:

To view which platforms performed the best, and which basically sucked overall, the following chart should be a good fit. I’ve taken the the top two positive categories “Universal Acclaim” and “Generally Favorable Reviews” and rolled them up into a “Positive Index.” Similarly, I created a “Negative Index” for titles that fall into the “Generally Unfavorable Reviews” and “Overwhelming Dislike.”

You can see from the results above, that Xbox 360 titles had more positive scored titles than any other platform. Conversely, the Wii had more titles scoring poorly than any other platform.

Continuing with the quality theme here, we’ll try to figure out which of the following platforms score more consistently (positive) than others. To do this, we’ll use our own grade scale with associated values for each grade:

We’ll take each game from 2008 (scored of course) and apply the appropriate points. In the end, we’ll take the best of the total points to determine which are the most consistent platform in regard to quality. Here’s the list in order of most consistent:

If you are at all skeptical about my conclusions, you’ll see more data in our reports that substantiates that the PS3 is the most consistent platform in regard to overall game quality.

Well, that wraps up the platform summary for 2008, which just happens to be the easiest. If you think I’ve missed something of interest here, please let me know. Also, if you are looking for detail that would illustrate publisher performance by platform, that will come in a later report.