Media Outlet Summary

In the Media Outlet Summary we’ll look at those who contributed to each Metacritic Score for 2008.  This will be the only section where we don’t actually use Metacritic scores, rather, the non-weighted average scores.  Basically, this means that we’ll be going through each game title and averaging the scores manually, so there will be no weighting influence.  For more information about the weighting system, please refer to our video report.

This following detail is a demonstration of what we refer to as a “deep dive.”  It requires that we take notice not only of basic game and scoring meta data for each title, but recognize the outlet data as well.  In a normal “shallow dive” we’d be looking at about 1,400 records for 2008, but in this case, we’ll be recognizing over 25,000 (each media outlet review).

We could use this method to determine possible outlet bias towards a particular platform, genre, developer, or publisher.  We could furthermore determine outlet comparisons based on the outlet type.  For example, Game Centric outlets vs. Consumer Outlets, or by region, i.e.  North America vs. International. 

For reference, there were 177 Media Outlets Contributing to Metacritic results for 2008.  Our first table shows the top contributing media outlets for 2008, their average score, the average non-weighted score for the titles in which they contributed, and the variance between the two.  A positive variance means they are more favorable to the average score, while a negative number notes they are more critical than average.  

The distribution of those media outlets that are more/less favorable than the average are represented by the pie chart below:

These next two tables represent the most favorable and most critical outlets overall.  Again, the “Var” column notes how many points higher/lower the outlet is for the average non-weighted score.  For example, in the table below, Gamers Europe had 1 review with a score of 36 while the average of all the other contributing outlets was 65.