Score: Metacritic Drops Dev Ratings

And there was much rejoicing. Following a web-wide waggling of worried eyebrows (of which I was just one of a great many), Metacritic has done the decent thing and removed its ratings of individual developers.

Mr 8%? It's okay. It's over now. You're free.

Says the site's games boss Marc Doyle, in comparing the dev ratings to a similar system used for movie actors and directors:

"This career score is not an independent evaluation (or an aggregation of reviews of) the individual person in question – it’s a simple average of all the individual Metascores assigned to those movies the individual worked on."

Alas, while that may have been the intent, when you publish a guy's name with a number next to it it's very hard not to treat it as a rating.

However, he acknowledges in response to the "enthusiastic discussion in the gaming press and social media" that "although our credits database (which is powered by our sister site GameFAQs) is growing, as our users’ feedback has indicated, it is a work in progress and is not nearly as comprehensive as it needs to be to accurately provide a career score for these individuals.

"As such, we have removed that career score from the pages dedicated to creative individuals behind games on Metacritic."

So that's that. Good on them, quite frankly - it's a site subject to a lot of criticism (some fair, some not) so picking out and acting on particular complaints is no mean feat. They're still wanting to build a more comprehensive credits database however, and seem aware that the ones on GameFaqs are currently far from that. It could be a useful tool for hacks like us if they do get it right.