The site will be undergoing a radical transformation. It will no longer be a blog. There will be a different sense of humor to the site. I think it will be even more funny, just because of what it will do to both the game reviewing and game publishing industries.

The joke is this: lots of people love sites like GameRankings and MetaCritic. Publishers and fanboys alike use a game’s average score like a weapon. But really, these sites tend to not provide useful information about a game’s review scores. Why? For a couple of reasons.

Blame falls mostly on the reviewers themselves. Most reviewers tend to artificially inflate a game’s score. This has become known as the 7-9 scale, so named due to the industry’s stubbornness in holding onto a 100-point scale, and it’s further stubbornness in using any parts of it that don’t fall between 72 and 95. A famous “IGN 9.2″ tends to have a lot of noise in its signal.

Further fault, however, lies with GameRankings and its ilk themselves, though. They tend to be more than a little forgiving when it comes to who’s allowed to contribute to the “averaged score”. The criteria for GameRankings comes down to a site needing to have a lot of reviews and having a current output of a certain number of reviews a month. Very egalitarian, but there are way too many sites run by, shall we say, the overeager. There are 34 sites with an average review score of 80 or higher. I’ll rephrase that because it bears repeating: GameRankings has 34 sites— that it uses to generate a game’s metascore— for whom the average game scores an 80. Or higher— the creampuff champ is PSE Magazine, which has 817 reviews, the average score of which is 86.7.

Metafuture will improve the service that sites like GameRankings provide. Put a better way, we will create the service that those sites attempt to provide. First of all, we’ll cut down on the number of review outlets. There’s no need to have a huge number of reviews for a game to provide a useful aggregated score. Magazines and the top websites will be just fine.

Second comes the funny part. Games will still get an average score from all contributing reviews. But a site’s contribution to that average will depend on that site’s own individual normal curve— with the immediate left and right of the bell’s tip signifying three stars on a scale of one to five. Watch the drama as the biggest sweethearts see their 8.4 score for Gun and Car IV get pegged as three stars.

Continue to subscribe to this blog for status updates; the blog will only truly die when the new site is ready to launch, and compiling data is going to take a significant amount of time. If you’re an editor of a review outlet or otherwise have access to raw review data, please contact the site. I won’t blame you if you don’t, though.

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