Lots of us use Metacritic, even if we don't necessarily think the site's score-computing methodology is fair or reflective of how we think of review scores. The site's greatest value comes from the database of scores and reviews, followed by the ability to sort games by Metascore (although the most recent site redesign doesn't make this easy). I use it to find older releases I may have overlooked that I could still pick up on the cheap.  

But Metacritic is a black box. While the score translation system is relatively transparent, the weighting system is not. If you simply add up all of the scores and divide by the number of reviews (a true mean) you won't get the same resulting "Metascore." That's because the site assigns secret (and proprietary!) weights to each review outlet.  So maybe Giant Bomb's Halo Reach score is worth double that of Gamereactor Sweden. Or maybe half. We don't know.  

 If people want to debate aggregate scores in forums, or if game publishers want to use them for PR or to drive incentives (ugh), they need a normalized system like this. The weights can’t change, and they need to be the same for everybody. But if I’m just using reviews to inform my own purchasing decisions, why would I want to use a score aggregator with a secret weighting system I don’t understand and probably don't agree with? I like the idea of a score aggregator, but for my purposes a Metascore™ is kind of useless. 

 What if I did know how they weighted review outlets, and I could change those weights to fit my own tastes? And what if I could fine-tune how scores were translated? That would be kind of cool, wouldn’t it?  

So that’s my idea. Create a site with Metacritic’s review score database and the same links to the actual reviews so I can dig deep, but let ME decide how I want to weight each outlet. And let ME decide that I want all scores to be set to the five-star scale (or 20 points, or 100, whatever), according to a crosswalk that I customize. Once I establish my weights and score translation system with a slick user interface, all aggregate scores - new and old - are updated to reflect my own custom system.   I could go further and assign weights to individual reviewers.

What do you guys think? Anybody want to steal my idea? Has it already been stolen?