I'd like to offer a not-so-brief explanation as to why Metacritic.com, since mid-February 2007, has not been posting each an every review that appears on GamesRadar.com.

By way of background, when Metacritic decides to start tracking the reviews and scores from a given publication, we MUST post each and every new review from that publication on Metacritic.com, assuming that we maintain a page for the particular game in question in the Metacritic database. We cannot pick and choose which reviews to post and which not to post, so long as we've decided to track the publication. Picking and choosing which review data to post from a given publication we track would not make sense, it would not be fair, and it would damage our credibility as a fair, unbiased resource for learning the critical response a game has received.

Beginning in early February of 2007, GamesRadar.com/us ["GR"], the American website which supports the Future Publishing family of magazines, changed their policy with respect publishing reviews, but they did not make (and have not, to this day, made) this practice explicit to their readers. Because I personally read hundreds of thousands of game reviews a year, I stumbled upon this new practice by accident. I first noticed that GR's review of the PSP game Chili Con Carnage was identical to the review written by Andy Kelly and published on page 70 of PSM3 Magazine, a British videogame enthusiast magazine owned by Future Publishing. Since that day in mid-February, I've noticed and recorded that as many as half of the reviews posted per day on GR originate from Future Publishing magazines in the UK, including NGamer Magazine UK, PC Gamer UK, PSW Magazine UK, and PC Zone UK. The remaining reviews are written by GR's in-house staff of American writers.

There is certainly nothing at all wrong with Future Publishing's "re-publishing" a review from one of their own magazines on one of their own websites, but it presents problems for Metacritic and our users for a couple of important reasons. Because I subscribe to or otherwise receive just about every Future Publishing magazine in the US and UK, I already post the "original" scores and brief excerpts from all the reviews in those magazines on Metacritic.com [including a parenthetical indicating the month or issue number and the page where the specific review can be found]. If I were to then publish the scores from the same reviews when they are republished at GR, I would be double-counting those reviews, which I cannot do.

What makes matters even more problematic for me, and for the hundreds of users who have written to me over the last month or so, is that GR does not indicate to the public which reviews are original, "in-house" reviews, and which reviews are re-published from Future's family of UK magazines. This is in contrast, incidentally, to the practice of another Future-owned website known as ComputerAndVideoGames.com operated in the UK, which also publishes many of Future's magazine reviews, but which ALSO indicates that it is doing so by posting the logo of the source magazine prominently at the top of the review.

So, every time a review is posted on GR, such as the review of SSX Blur, and the score/link/excerpt from that review is not subsequently posted on Metacritic, I get a stack of emails from the public asking me why. What the emailers don't realize (and they have no reason to realize), is that the review of SSX: Blur in question was originally published in NGamer Magazine, and that quote & score have already been posted on Metacritic. But again, because there is no indication on the GR website that the review originated from NGamer, it can appear that Metacritic is not posting the score due to carelessness or some other possible inappropriate reason.

To be clear: I know for a fact which reviews published on GR are "in-house" (original reviews written by their U.S. Staff) and which reviews have previously appeared in Future UK magazines because GR's editors have graciously been emailing me such details - and I can double check this information against the massive stack of UK magazines littering my office. So if I don't post review data from GR relative to a specific review, you can be certain that there is a reason for it, as described above. I have urged the editors at GR to simply indicate to their users where the reviews were orignally published, but the company has resisted doing so, which is their absolute right to do. It simply leads to confusion among their fans and my users here at Metacritic. But until they decide to do this, rest assured that I'm on top of things. I will only post scores/excerpts from "in-house" GR reviews.

Regards,

Marc Doyle
Games Editor
Metacritic.com

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