Is it possible, even a little bit, that people just have a different opinion than you about a video game? Surely if there was flagrant bribery happening, someone would have receipts and a conscience that compelled them to share it.
Comment on Mina The Hollower Is Now Metacritic's Highest-Rated Game Of 2026
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 hours agoTried it out with Mixtape: This and this both look the same, except Metacritic exposes the brazen astroturf campaigning going on with this mediocre game. I would also expect OpenCritic to have critics that weren’t directly paid by Annapurna Interactive on the list to drag the score down. Instead, the critic score is even higher.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 16 hours ago
The point is not that OpenCritic matches your taste or expectations of a game better than Metacritic. The point is that OpenCritic is more fair by giving everyone the same voice (average instead weighting) and allow more people to speak / vote. This does not guarantee a better result for you, it just makes it more fair and even. This way OpenCritic has less control of the result than Metacritic, because Metacritic has a hidden algorithm that weights voices differently.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
My point is that I took a famously overrated game that showed a clear disconnect between paid-off journalist shills and users who actually played the game. One of the sites exposed the disconnect. The other gave it a “80% player rating”.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 15 hours ago
But that is a systematic issue of those outlets, not an issue with the aggregator. OpenCritic just collects the ratings and presents an average. It’s not their job to control more. OpenCritic is just a mirror of those ratings. If those sites and outlets gave 10/10 all of them, then it should be reflected in the OpenCritic (and in Metascore for that matter).