Release of Metacritic

Metacritic is a website that collects reviews of films, television programmes, music albums and video games, and calculates a single weighted average score for each work, known as the Metascore. It was founded by Jason Dietz, Marc Doyle and Julie Doyle Roberts. Reviews are taken from established critics and publications and are converted to a hundred-point scale, with colour coding to show whether the overall response was positive, mixed or negative. The site is especially influential in the video game industry, where publishers sometimes tie bonuses and contracts to scores. Critics argue that boiling reviews down to one number oversimplifies opinion, and that the weighting process is not transparent.

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