Metacritic dev scores gone for good

Metacritic's controversial developer career scores system will not return.

The review aggregation site blamed poorly detailed credits for the decision.

"We have no plans to bring it back. Right now we just want to see if we can build the database, take a shot at it, see what we can do," co-founder and games editor Marc Doyle told GamesIndustry.biz.

On Tuesday Metacritic axed developer career scores following complaints and criticism from the game press and industry.

It determined whether a game developer played a part in the creation of a game by having a gander at the credits entered on GameFAQs, which, like Metacritic, is owned by CBS.

Miyamoto had a career score of 80, Kojima 83, and Molyneux 82.

"If they've worked on 30 games and we can only show four and then we take on this score, which is really just an average of those games in our database for them, then that's not fair," Doyle admitted.

"We discussed it as a team and it made sense to just drop that overall number whilst still trying to build this database which will be difficult, but we're going to give it a shot. It's needless to put that number on it though."

Doyle called for better tracking of game credits. "I think that is an issue, of the industry not needing or not wanting to put that information out there," he said. "I don't know exactly what's behind that, I haven't discussed that with too many publishers."