Metacritic 2008 Genre Summary

This next section was tricky in that each title can have multiple Metacritic genres assigned.  Of the 1,654 titles from 2008, there are a total of well over 60 different genres with titles comprised of one to three genres each.  I would have been generating charts for days, and I think the overall meaning would have been lost or at least diluted.  Rather than attempt to assign only one genre per game title, I applied a much different approach which yeilded the summary information I was looking to achieve.   The only occasion where I “changed” the genre was in regard to “Racing” and “Driving” which I rolled into one category.

In the end, what I decided to do was to categorize genre’s into basic buckets/categories.   For example, the category of “shooter” is comprised of any title regardless of “First Person Shooter” or “Third Person” shooter.  The same applies to all “Sports” so you won’t see specific sub-categories, i.e. baseball, basketball, football, etc.   This is also true of the “strategy” category as the following summary doesn’t distinguish between “Turn Based Strategy”, “Real Time Strategy.” 

The ability to assign multiple custom genre categories still exists as in the case “King’s Bounty: The Legend” by Atari which has both “Role-Playing Game” and “Turn-Based Strategy” genres applied.  In this case this title would be part of the analysis of the “Strategy” category, as well as the “RPG” category.  The downside here is that many genres such as “Wrestling” simply won’t be included in this review unless they also fall into one of the custom categories I created.  

Finally, there are separate categories for “Action Adventure” and “Action” and “Adventure.”  I did this because “Action Adventure” is not a specific genre category in Metacritics Index.  They would apply “Action” and “Adventure” as separate genre categorys.  So why didn’t I just stick with “Action Adventure” and not show results for other titles that might fall into discreet “Action” or “Adventure” categories?  Well, both of these are common genres, even if they don’t alway appear together.

The table below breaks down the number of titles which fall into the specified genre category for each platform.  Each row (genre) will also display at least one “Orange” and “Green” highlight which simply notes the lowest/highest number of titles for that genre.  For example, the “PS3″ had the most titles for the genre ‘Driving/Racing’ while the “PS2″ had the least.  You can use they key to identify which are the most and least popular genres for any given platform.

This next table displays the average Metacritic score for each Genre by Platform.  As is the case above, I have also applied a “green” highlight for the highest average score and an “orange” highlight for the lowest average score.   You can start to see some patterns here in regard to which platforms score the best for each genre. 

You want to be careful here as some of this can surprizing/misleading.  For example, you’ll notice the DS is noted as having the best average score for the “Shooter” genres, although it only has five game titles in that category.  With that said, the takeaway here is in regard to general viability.  The “DS” is in fact a viable platform for the “Shooter” genre.  Likewise, you can also tell that the “PS3″ and “PSP” Platforms show a higher MC average than other platforms.

What we did here was take the highest Metacritic Score noted for each Genre/Platform.  The cells highlighted in “green” note highest score for that particular genre.  For example, the “PS3″ and “Xbox 360″ both had the highest Metacritic scores for the “Driving/Racing” genre.  The platform with the largest frequency of high scores was the “Xbox 360″ while both the “PSP” and “DS” were associated with the lowest frequency of high scores.

Much like the table above, the following notes the “lowest” Metacritic scores recorded for each Genre/Platform.  The “Orange” highlight represents the lowest of the low scores for each genre.  For example, the “Wii” had the lowest Metacritic score for the “Driving/Racing” genre.  You’ll notice that the “Wii” has the highest frequency of low Metacritic average scores than any other platform.

This next table is pretty telling in it’s simplicity.  It notes whether each platform is above, or below the average for the respective genre.  The  “Green” notes “Above Average”, “Orange” notes “Below Average” and “Light Blue” is “Average.”

You can tell that both the “PS3″ platform is associated with more “above average” scores than other platforms which is consistent with our platform summary.  Conversely, the “DS” is associated with more “below average” scores.

We’ll touch more on both Genres and Platforms as we present the detail for Publishers.