Archive 2008 Scoring Analysis

2008 Scoring Analysis

The 2008 Metacritic Summary Guide

We have presented what is likely the most comprehensive summary of Metacritic scoring summary for 2008, but the we realize the amount of detail may be duanting and a bit tough to navigate. This section should help you find what you need.

Game Titles with notable weighting swings (2008)

This section provides details regarding games released in 2008 where Metacritics Weighting system had a noteable impact to the Metacritic Score.

Metacritic 2008 Platform Summary

The platform summary is helpful for those who are looking for detail regarding the volume of titles by platform or highest scoring platforms. Also in this section is our determination of the most consistent platform in regard to favorable scores.

Metacritic 2008 ESRB Summary

Curious about the volume and average scores as it relates to ESRB? This section is formatted in the same manner as the platform summary and details volume and highest scores by each ESRB Category as well as a look at favorability.

Metacritic 2008 Genre Summary

There is a wealth of interesting data here. In the genre summary, we’ll take a peek at Genre distribution and favorability overall, as well as digging in to both ESRB and Platform distribution by Genre.

Developers: Intro & ESRB Summary - Part One

The first part in our Developer series provides some interesting detail in regard to developer performance overall, and as it relates to their performance by ESRB Category.

Developers: Genre - Part Two

As an extention of our genre summary, we take a look at the both the volume and performance of developers by Genre.

Developers: Platforms & Consistent Peformers - Part Three

Developer volume and high score distribution is reviewed. We also make our own determination regarding the most consistent developers for 2008.

Publishers: Intro & ESRB Summary - Part One

Following the same format as we did with developers, we’ll take a look at the publisher volume and related scoring detail. The ESRB section will give you some insight regarding publisher performance by ESRB category.

Publishers: Genre Summary - Part Two

For those of you who want to know about how the various publishers perform by genre, this section is for you. Explored are both volume and highest scorers by genre.

Publishers: Platforms & Consistent Peformers - Part Three

Our final publisher section explores the performance by platform. Also presented is our determination of the most consistent publisher for 2008.

Media Outlet Summary

Who ever does this? Well, we do. In the media outlet summary we provide some context behind the reviewers that contribute to the Metacritic scores. Who contributed the most reviews? Who are favorable reviewers? Who are the most critical? Interesting stuff.

Historical Reference for 2008 Summary

The Historical reference provides and overview of game volume and average Metacritic scores from 2000 to 2008. Also provided are historical comparisons by platform and ESRB.

Metacritic Weighting Video Report

We have a few video reports you may find helpful. This video in particular is perhaps the most insightful as it expolores Metacritics Weighting System and the related impact to the index scores.

Monday, March 2nd, 2009 2008 Scoring Analysis No Comments

Historical Reference for 2008 Summary

This section provides some historical context you may find helpful. I have focused largely on overall game volume, and breakdowns for ESRB and Platforms, i.e. volume and average Metacritic scores by category.

Game Volume by Year

Average Metacritic Scores by Year

ESRB Volume by Year

Metacritic Averages by ESRB

Platform Volume by Year

Average Metacritic Scores by Platform

Monday, March 2nd, 2009 2008 Scoring Analysis, Historical No Comments

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.

Top Media Outlets By Volume

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

Media Outlet Favorability Distribution

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.

Most Favorable Outlets for 2008

Most Critical Outlets for 2008

Sunday, March 1st, 2009 2008 Scoring Analysis 1 Comment

Publishers: Platforms & Consistent Peformers - Part Three

As with the first two parts of our publisher summary, we’ll be continuing the table theme as we did with the ESRB’s and Genres. If you simply want to know who the most consistent publishers are, then scroll to the bottom.

These scores, averages, and counts are unique to the specific platform, and may not reflect the developers overall counts, or averages. Each Platform is represented by two tables, one displaying the most popular (frequency) of developers, and the second notes the highest MC scores in that Platform category by developer.

For reference, the green highlighted cells represent the highest value in that column, whereas the orange represents the lowest. For example, “Square Enix” has the highest value in the category, “Best MC Score” while the lowest score of the featured publishers is “Activision.”

Most Popular Publishers for Platform 'DS'

Highest Scoring Developers for Platform 'DS'

Most Popular Publishers for Platform 'PC'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Platform 'PC'

Most Popular Developers for Platform 'PS2'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Platform 'PS2'

Most Popular Publishers for Platform 'PS3'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Platform 'PS3'

Most Popular Publishers for Platform 'PSP'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Platform 'PSP'

Most Popular Publishers for Platform 'Wii'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Platform 'Wii'

Most Popular Publishers for Platform 'Xbox 360'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Platform 'Xbox 360'

Finally, we’ll wrap up this segment of the summary by trying to figure out who the most consistent publishers are. For reference, we’ll be applying the same method we did for platforms, ESRB, and Developers by using the following scale:

Game Grading Scale

The overall total will give us the most consistent publishers for 2008. And the winners are:

Most Consistent Publishers of 2008

The final two sections in the summary will provide some historic perspective, and we’ll also dive into some metrics regarding the media outlets that contribute to the Metacritic scores.

Sunday, March 1st, 2009 2008 Scoring Analysis No Comments

Publishers: Genre Summary - Part Two

These scores, averages, and counts are unique to the specific genre, and may not reflect the publishers overall counts, or averages. Each Genre is represented by two tables, one displaying the most popular (frequency) of developers, and the second notes the highest Metacritic scores in that Genre by developer.

If you have any questions in regard to how I came about this selection of Genres, or how they were aggregated, please review the Genre Summary. As with all the previous publisher summary, the counts do not include titles where no Metacritic Score was available (see the intro here).

For reference, the green highlighted cells represent the highest value in that column, whereas the orange represents the lowest. For example, THQ has the highest volume of titles, Rockstar with the “Best MC Score” and “Avg MC Score” while the lowest score goes to THQ (orange).

Most Popular Publishers for Genre 'Action Adventure'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Genre 'Action Adventure'

Most Popular Developers for Genre 'Action'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Genre 'Action'

Most Popular Publishers for Genre 'Adventure'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Genre 'Adventure'

Most Popular Publishers for Genre 'Driving'

Highest Scoring Developers for Genre 'Driving'

Most Popular Publishers for Genre 'Sports'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Genre 'Sports'

Most Popular Publishers for Genre 'Strategy'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Genre 'Strategy'

Most Popular Publishers for Genre 'Music'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Genre 'Music'

Most Popular Publishers for Genre 'Puzzle'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Genre 'Puzzle'

Most Popular Publishers for Genre 'Shooters'

Highest Scoring Publishers for Genre 'Shooters'

Publishers: Intro & ESRB Summary - Part One

As we did with the developer summary, the publisher detail will be in three parts. For reference, the counts shown in the following tables reflect game titles for which Metacritic had a score associated. Metacritic requires that each title have at least four media reviews before a score is assigned. For more details, please view our platform summary.

The publisher data in the next few sections is somewhat normalized. Publishers are often noted differently depending of branch, region, or if they were in a partnership with another party. For example, “Sega” and “Sega Europe” are all represented as “Sega.” We also consolidated the various 2K properties, but did not rollup Rockstar under the 2k umbrella.

The green highlighted areas you’ll see represent the highest values for a column, and the orange highlight for the lowest. For example, the Top 10 Publisher list below notes that Electronic Arts had the highest number of titles, Sony with the best Metacritic Scores, and Activision with worst score. The “Worst” scores are not the overall “worst”, yet just the lowest score in the table and/or column.

Top 10 Game Publishers by Volume

Now we’ll take the top publishers see how their scores are distributed in Metacritics Favorability Index.

Favorability Distribution for Top 5 Publishers

The table below illustrates the percentage distribution of games scored that fall within simple “positive”, “negative”, and “nuetral” categories. This should be helpful to identify basic quality performance.

Top Developers by Volume / General Favorability Distribution

The following are the top developers who scored the most titles falling into the favorability category “Universal Acclaim.”

Publishers with Most "Universal Acclaim" titles

This next table is a summary of highest Metacritic Scores and the associated publishers.

Publishers with the Highest Metacritic Scores

Next we’ll take a look at a series of tables related to the appropriate ESRB and see who publishes the most games per category as well as the best rated games. Note that the scores for best, worst, as well as the averages are a subset of that particular ESRB category. These scores may not reflect that publishers overall best, worst, etc. For example, the Average Rating, is actually the average for that publisher in the noted ESRB category.

Developers: Platforms & Consistent Peformers - Part Three

As with the first two parts of our developer summary, we’ll be continuing the table theme as we did with the ESRB’s and Genres. If you simply want to know who the most consistent developers are, then scroll to the bottom.

Developers: Genre - Part Two

Not unlike the detail in Part 1 for our developer summary, we’ll be continuing the table theme as we did with the ESRB’s.

These scores, averages, and counts are unique to the specific genre, and may not reflect the developers overall counts, or averages. Each Genre is represented by two tables, one displaying the most popular (frequency) of developers, and the second notes the highest MC scores in that Genre by developer.

If you have any questions in regard to how I came about this selection of Genres, or how they were aggregated, please review the Genre Summary. For reference, the green highlighted cells represent the highest value in that column, whereas the orange represents the lowest. For example, Ubisoft Montreal has the highest values in the categories, “Best MC Score” and “Avg MC Score” while the lowest score goes to Heavy Iron Studios.

Most Popular Developers for Genre 'Action Adventure'

Best Scoring Developers for Genre 'Action Adventure'

Developers: Intro & ESRB Summary - Part One

Of the 1,650+ titles comprised in the summary for 2008, there are well over 300 developers. That pretty much limits us on what we can do with the data. For the most part, we’ll be displaying tables that identify the developers with a higher frequency of titles released per category, i.e. genere, platform, etc. We’ll also note which developers scored the highest Metacritic score in each category.

The green highlighted areas you’ll see represent the highest values for a column, and the orange highlight for the lowest. For example, TellTale Games had the highest Metacritic score above all others, whereas Konami had the lowest posted Metacritic Score, etc.

Top 10 Developers by Number of Titles

Now we’ll take the top developers see how their scores are distributed in Metacritics Favorability Index.

Top 5 Developers Favorability Index

The following are the top developers who scored the most titles falling into the favorability category “Universal Acclaim”

Top Developers Creating Titles considered 'Universal Acclaim'

Below is a list of the top 10 developers scoring the highest overall Metacritic Ratings.

Top 10 Developers by Highest MC Scores

Next we’ll take a look at a series of tables related to the appropriate ESRB and see who develops the most games per category as well as the best rated games. Note that the scores for best, worst, as well as the averages are a subset of that particular ESRB category. These scores may not reflect that developers overall best, worst, etc. For example, the Average Rating, is actually the average for that developer in the noted ESRB category.

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.

Number of Titles (scored) by Platform Genre

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.

Average Scores by Genre / Platform

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.

Highest MC Scores by Genre / Platform

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.

Lowest MC Scores by Genre / 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.

Above & Below Avg by Genre / Platform

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

Sunday, February 15th, 2009 2008 Scoring Analysis 2 Comments

About GameQuarry.com

2008 Scoring Analysis

The 2008 Metacritic Summary Guide

Historical Reference for 2008 Summary

Media Outlet Summary

Publishers: Platforms & Consistent Peformers - Part Three

Publishers: Genre Summary - Part Two

Publishers: Intro & ESRB Summary - Part One

Developers: Platforms & Consistent Peformers - Part Three

Developers: Genre - Part Two

Developers: Intro & ESRB Summary - Part One

Metacritic 2008 Genre Summary

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