(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)
SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- Movies have Roger Ebert. Wine has Robert Parker. Videogames have Marc Doyle.
Mr. Doyle edits game reviews for Metacritic, a Web site he co-founded that can influence the sales of games and the stocks of videogame publishers. One company requires game publishers to pay higher royalties if they receive low scores on such sites.
But unlike conventional critics, Mr. Doyle rarely plays videogames and instead spends more time strumming his banjo. He has little interest in mingling with game makers. In July, he didn't join other game reviewers in previewing new titles at E3, a major computer and videogame trade show -- even though the event took place a few blocks from his house.
"I'm not the star of the show," says Mr. Doyle.
Yet in many videogame circles, the system he helped to create is. Metacritic compiles game reviews from more than 100 publications and then averages them into a single score, on a 1-to-100 scale, to help consumers make smarter purchases. The site also reviews movies, music and other forms of entertainment.
Metacritic's Web site ranks games, TV and more.
But such review sites hold the most sway in the videogame industry partly because the stakes are higher for consumers shelling out $50 to $60 for a new game than they are for someone buying, for example, a $10 movie ticket.
Some game companies now tie bonuses for their developers to game scores on such sites, while the stocks of game publishers can fall when a new title gets a disappointing score. "Everyone wants to make that game [that gets a score] of 85-plus," says Jim Ward, president of LucasArts, the games division of Lucasfilm Ltd. in San Francisco.
Game publisher Activision Inc. two years ago began using scores from a site called Game Rankings to determine part of its bonus compensation for employees, in order to spur its game-making teams to create better products. Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. has a similar policy for makers of its sports videogames.
Metacritic and Game Rankings are both owned by CNET Networks Inc. Game Rankings, unlike Metacritic, focuses only on games.
About 18 months ago, Activision also conducted a study of 789 games made for Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 2 console and found a strong correlation between some high game scores and strong sales. Activision Chief Executive Robert Kotick says the link was especially notable for games that score above 80% on Game Rankings, which grades games on a 1-to-100 percentage basis, with 100% being a perfect score. For every five percentage points above 80%, Activision found sales of a game roughly doubled. Activision believes game scores, among other factors, can actually influence sales, not just reflect their quality.
Because Metacritic and Game Rankings typically post scores quickly after a game debuts and before any sales data are publicly available, Wall Street is also paying attention to them. On a Friday in early May, Activision's Spider-Man 3, a game based on the movie of the same name, hit store shelves to generally mediocre reviews. Metacritic gave the PlayStation 2 version of the game a 50, compared with an 80 for Spider-Man 2 for the same console.
By the following Monday, several financial analysts had noted Spider-Man 3's low scores as a possible concern for Activision. The Santa Monica, Calif., company's shares dropped 5% that day and continued sliding for the remainder of that week. In August, shares of Take-Two soared nearly 20% the week after its new game, Bioshock, got a nearly perfect Metacritic score, a 97 (it has since fallen to 96 as more reviews were included in its average).
All of this makes Metacritic's Mr. Doyle an unlikely kingmaker in the $7.4 billion U.S. games industry. He controls Metacritic's scoring system, deciding which publications to compile reviews from -- a varied list that includes trade magazines like GameInformer, the New York Times, a gamer Web site called Fourfatchicks.com and other outlets.
Mr. Doyle, who graduated from the University of Southern California law school, launched Metacritic on the Web in January 2001 with his sister, Julie Doyle Roberts, and Jason Dietz, a law-school classmate. Mr. Doyle says he realized then that the Internet was well-suited for providing a composite of reviews, minimizing the impact of individual critics' idiosyncratic tastes. Another site, Rotten Tomatoes, now owned by News Corp., was already compiling movie reviews but Mr. Doyle and his partners saw an opportunity to cover a broader range of media. The trio sold the site to CNET two years ago for an undisclosed sum. Mr. Doyle, 36, is now a senior product manager at CNET but he also acts as games editor of Metacritic.
These days, publishers frequently plead with Mr. Doyle to exclude reviews they deem unfair from Metacritic scores. Some have argued that reviews in British publications are biased against American football videogames, he says. But once he has included a publication in the Metacritic system, Mr. Doyle says he refuses to omit any individual reviews based on such complaints.
The site's scores are weighted averages, in which Mr. Doyle assigns more significance to the reviews of certain publications based on their stature. It's a formula he declines to disclose, calling it Metacritic's "secret sauce."
Metacritic's method for calculating scores is a sore spot with some game reviewers. While many game publications give numerical scores on 100-point scales, some assign letter grades like those that students receive in school. In such cases, Mr. Doyle converts A grades to a score of 100 and F's to a score of zero, even though some reviewers believe F's should be closer to a score of 50. In cases where there are no scores, the reviewer will sometimes independently send a score to Mr. Doyle that he or she thinks is a fair representation of the review.
"We give Metacritic's funhouse mirror conversion scheme an F+," Joe Dodson, a former editor at review site Game Revolution, wrote in an essay last year criticizing Metacritic and similar sites. Mr. Dodson's main beef was that Metacritic's conversion system for letter grades turns Game Revolution's reviews into scores that are too low.
Metacritic's scores aren't always on the mark as a sales predictor. That's especially true with games based on movies, where a well-loved, well-marketed film can lift sales of even games most critics dislike. Despite relatively poor scores, analysts believe Activision's Spider-Man 3 game will likely closely match the more than four million copies sold of Spider-Man 2 in the U.S. and far outsell the first game in the series.
Yet many executives say there's at least an indirect link between game sales and scores. Much of the games business is now oriented around "franchises" -- concepts that can indefinitely produce sequels and spinoff titles -- and savage game scores can hurt the long-term sales potential of such a franchise, executives say.
"The first version of a game might sell OK," says Neil Young, general manager at Electronic Arts Inc., the world's biggest games publisher. "Now when you think about doing a second version of a product, you've got an uphill battle."
Three years ago, Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros., unhappy with the quality of some games based on Warner movies, decided to take action. Jason Hall, then the head of Warner's game efforts, began including "quality metrics" in the contracts the studio signed with partners interested in licensing Warner movies for games.
If game publishers don't deliver products that receive specified scores or better from Metacritic, Game Rankings or other sites, some deals require game publishers to pay higher royalties on game sales to Warner than they would have for better-scored games. A spokeswoman for Warner says it's too early to determine how much the studio's policy is affecting overall game quality.
Mr. Doyle, who was once an avid gamer, may soon get reacquainted with the games he has largely stopped playing. He says he is tempted by a wave of new games coming out for the holidays and may buy one of the latest game consoles to play them. He won't say which ones.
Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications:
The E3 videogame trade show took place in July. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it took place in May.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page B1
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