Metacritic helps business objectivity, says Hayes

Sega Europe president and COO, Mike Hayes, has told GamesIndustry.biz that he believes Metacritic is a useful industry tool that can help to provide "objectivity into the business" - but that it needs to be used sensibly if factored into developer deals.

He was speaking after earlier comments made by Splash Damage studio head Paul Wedgwood, who questioned the wisdom that such pressure applied to some developers to achieve certain Metacritic scores, calling it "ridiculous".

But Hayes points out that for any company spending the amount of money required to bring a top game to market, a metric for judging quality is important.

"The first thing is that we're always trying to put objectivity into the business," he said. "We're a creative business, and how do you put objectivity into it? But at the end of the day publishers will always want to do that, particularly if you're spending USD 20 million - you have to try and find that objectivity, and it's going to come from how much it costs, when it's coming out, and how good the game is.

"I don't think you can get away from that, and Metacritic provides a service that gives you a part of that."

But he noted that it wasn't a tool that could be applied in blanket-fashion across the board.

"It's horses for courses. If you're going for a high-end PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 game and you want to break out in the genre, or something like that, you have to target that quality - because otherwise you don't have a hope in Hell. There's too much evidence that shows games which score below a certain level in certain genres are not going to cut through.

"However, there are other genres and other platforms where we wouldn't put a developer against that score, because it's more about the brand, the license, the release timing - it's probably something that in the Metacritic basket of reviews, they're not going to look at the same things that we're going to look for when making a game.

"So when we're doing developer contracts, we won't say to every developer we work with that there's a target in there. But where we're spending a lot of money, and the score is essential to the success of the product, absolutely I think there's a value in it.

"We value the scores that we're given by the media - it's a very good way of measuring it - and I don't think it's unreasonable for publishers spending that much money to have certain expectations of quality levels. But to demand it on absolutely everything wouldn't be right at all."

The concluding part of the interview with Mike Hayes, from which these quotes are taken, will be available on Monday. The first part of that interview, in which he discusses at length the challenges faced by the industry in the current economic climate, is available now.