I suspect that there's probably two things that put GB into that lower weighted group:
Fewer reviews. GB simply doesn't review as many games as a lot of the sites in the higher weighted groups.
GB has a five point scale (and they actually use the entire scale). This can cause GB review scores on Metacritic to sometimes appear that they aren't in line with other reviews even when the content of the review and intent of the score are generally consistent with the critical consensus.
I think that it probably has a lot to do with the second. I think that if they went to a 10 point scale, Metacritic would probably override the first reason and just bump their score to one of the higher groups. Honestly, it makes a lot of sense that you would want to buffer a scale with so few options. A 4 star review could mean a whole lot of things, but Metacritic has to just treat it as some number from 1-100, so making it affect the net less makes it less jarring and misleading.
I think Metacritic's aggregated scores are a huge waste of time. Don't get me wrong, I use Metacritic all the time, I love it, but I love it because it brings a lot of critic reviews to one place and gives me a general idea of who is sitting where on each game. I literally never look at the aggregate score. It is a great jumping off point to look for people who highlight the best things about a game as well as people who highlight the worst things about it.
If anything, this is actually a good sign to me, because it means that there is no favoritism going on. CBSi owns both GB and Metacritic, and seeing Metacritic choose to lower the value of another CBSi company's opinion at least assures me that they aren't doing something super shady.
Or they are doing something even shadier and they are just doing this to divert attention, whatever. Regardless, it really doesn't matter. If I were GB, I would not give a shit about this.
I've been in the SpyParty beta for the better part of a year now, but I haven't played it in a while. I've been looking for a reason to get back in to it, and I am curious what other people on giantbomb think about it.
I love it, but the skill curve is out of control. That's not a problem, but it is a highly skill-based multiplayer only game, with a tightly controlled player-base, so the minimum level to compete got away from me pretty quickly. I think the ideas in it are fantastic and the actual playing of the game itself is superb, but there is certainly work to be done on the things surrounding that.
Anyway, just wanted to remind people that this game exists and get some other opinions on it.
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