Users give too much importance to ratings and Metacritic, according to Goichi Suda: interviewed by GamesIndustry.biz together with his colleague Shinji Mikami, the visionary Japanese game designer explained that the scoring mechanism leads developers to conform, adhering to pre-established formulas.
“Everyone pays too much attention to Metacritic ratings,” Suda said. “It’s gotten to the point where there is now almost a pre-established formula: if you want to get a certain average, you have to make the game this way.”
“But if your title doesn’t fit into that formula, into that realm of marketability, it loses points on Metacritic. The problem is that Big companies don’t want to have to deal with this kind of situation: maybe it’s not the main reason, but one of the reasons. We think too much about numbers.”
“Personally, I don’t care about the Metacritic ratings (…): what matters to us is making the games we want to make and make sure people can play the games we want them to play.”
Sometimes reading those scores was unavoidable, though. “There have been times when publications have given us a zero! I felt like shit: why would they go to the point of giving us a zero? Aside from those exceptions, however, I try to avoid Metacritic.”
There is a risk in these mechanisms, for Mikami
We know that Suda51 would like to make a sequel to Shadows of the Damned involving Shinji Mikami, and who knows if the two have already reached some kind of agreement in this sense. For sure they share the same opinion also on the Metacritic topic.
According to Mikami, in fact, one of the reasons why original and/or unconventional games often end up being ignored lies in the fact that Big budget titles attract attention also due to the significant marketing resources that are invested.
“The kind of games that get the most marketing support are the ones that need to appeal to the widest possible audience,” he said. “The more unique titles don’t have the same marketability.”
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