Metacritic To Make Gamers Wait Before Posting User Reviews

This won't stop review bombing it might even make it worse.. I never understood review bombing, It's so immature..

Didn’t see them doing this at the time of Halo 5.

@themightyant verified would be good

@Z3u5000 I agree, they are doing this only after all the bombing against Sony exclusives!
But it's a right move, I agree

@Z3u5000 I don't know what the meta critic reviews were like at the release but currently 3,000 user reviews on Halo 5 vs 129,000 on TLOU2 is a big difference. So from that point of view, I can understand the concern that there's this huge increase of user reviews surrounding divisive games.

That said I think Halo 5 deserves its low user score, and I'm glad the game didn't launch a few years later or I'm sure we'd see a landslide of articles telling us how bigots are fueling hate on the game because it replaces the white protagonist with a person of colour. And as I type this it occurs to me that there's probably articles like this that already exist, and that despite Halo Infinite looking to fix what Halo 4 and 5 broke, we'll probably, most definitely, get a kotaku article talking about how Halo Infinite is pandering to far right racist gamers.

This really doesn’t mean much, in my opinion.

If people are actually make a purchasing decision based on user scores or reviews on Metacritic, that’s their own fault.

And PlayStation exclusives get a lot of 10’s from people who haven’t played the game yet too.

With that said......they should just link into your Xbox or PSN account to prove you played the game. But that will never happen.

@KelticDevil well said

This is a good move, but it's not going to stop review bombing.

Part of me thinks it's best to simply not allow user reviews, but that would be a great disservice to everyone who can present a well constructed review, whose writing isn't full of spelling and grammatical errors, and who don't always score in extremes of 0 or 10.

It's true everyone's opinion is valid, but not all of their arguments are.

So for huge 20 hr plus games this is great and totally makes sense. What about games that can be completed in 2-6 hrs that can be finished in an afternoon? A 3 day wait seems a bit extreme in that case.

I havent looked at metacritic in years. I sometimes look at the review roundups that some sites publish.

Ive played a few 1/10 games in the past. Roy Keanes International Soccer on PS2 is a great example 🤣 but it gave me a few comical gaming sessions after I had over indulged a bit so I got my moneys worth.

Maybe I am too old school and games have got more expensive since then but there is a certain charm to purchasing a random game to try it out without reading too much into reviews.

@Jaxx420 Hah! I haven't been like that since the PS1 era, reminds me of playing some random clunky fireman game I picked up from a bargain bin in woollies (when that was a thing) and getting strange enjoyment out of it. Here's to old school random purchases!

Metacritic is a despicable dishonest website, they were deliberately blocking genuine reviews of The Last Of Us 2 because they weren’t all positive, like Nighty Dog ringing reviewers telling them to give their game good scores. Plus then you had endless 10 out of 19 reviews bing allowed, the review bombing was very obviously going both ways.

"This new waiting period for user reviews has been rolled out across Metacritic's Games section and was based on data-driven research and with the input of critics and industry experts."

Most likely the same "critics and industry experts" that gave Schindler's List perfect 10's. 😂

It sounds like this is just done for marketing purposes, so there is less feedback around launch making games look more attractive initially based upon critic feedback. Metacritic in general is just a very corrupt site though, they for the most part only display the highest ratings and show just one lower rating and one negative rating. The whole concept seems to be based around promoting games as much as possible and I am sure their advertisers have a lot to do with their biased approach. At this point they are delving deeper into anti-consumer practices and it's just not a good source for genuine user feedback.

@gingataisen These days most "industry experts" are just an extension of marketing. A lot of the big gaming sites have been exposed for numerous controversies involving paid shilling, political motivations, and plagiarism.

I don’t think I’ve ever used meatacritic. I usually check some gameplay/walkthrough footage to see if the story interests me and of the gameplay is any good. I never go off other people’s reviews or opinions because I not sure of their credibility on the product.

Example from a quick google search Murdered:Soul Suspect has a review of 5.5/10 implying a below average game but I really enjoyed the story and gameplay, whereas Fallout 4 has a score of 9/10 and I didn’t much care for it.