Weekly Steam News (24/03/2006)

[Chris D]

Some interesting news this week on a new addition to the Steam Shop:

As most of you know, using Steam to get new games is easy. Just browse for something interesting and pretty soon you're saving Darwinians or driving a Russian tank. But we want it to be even easier for you to decide which games might be right for you, so we've just added an important feature to Steam:[br]

[br]Starting today, games available for purchase in the Steam store will display their Metascore® (from metacritic.com), which is a numeric measure of the game's critical consensus at a glance. The Metascore is created by taking a weighted average of critic grades. We really couldn't think of a more honest, efficient, and independent source of information about game quality. We hope you agree.[br]By the way! Congratulations to Introversion are in order, because their game Darwinia just won the Grand Prize at this year's Independent Games Festival. Nice work, guys! (Hardly surprising; Darwinia's Metascore is 85!)

Check out Steam or this page for the original post.

 

[X_i_Z_o_R]

Sounds good nice stuff

 

[Asuka]

Humm very interesting.

 

[SimonomiS]

http://www.metacritic.com/games/pc/scores/

Top two scores in PC Games are Valve titles heh.

http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/n64/legendofzeldaocarina

99/100? As Vader would say; Impressive.

 

[OvA]

good news I guess.....but still can't prove it's unbiased

 

[Geogriffith]

We really couldn't think of a more honest, efficient, and independent source of information about game quality.

I can. Free demos of every game, available same-day (or earlier) as the game release.

I got suckered by all the hype and the glowing reviews about Rag Doll Kung Fu. Had there been a demo out, I could have known if I liked the game before paying for it. As it stands now, I'm never buying another thing from Steam unless it has a demo. Valve was brilliant when they released the HL2 demo, because everyone could see if the game ran on their system, and how cool the gravity gun was. Sold me on the Silver package in 15 minutes.

Maybe they ought to encourage the 3rd party developers to do the same.

 

[RP.]

good news I guess.....but still can't prove it's unbiased

Metacritic doesn't make the scores.
They collect scores from other site make an average, so it can't be biased.

Also CS:CZ got 65, not much of a bias there...

 

[-smash-]

Hmm, this is a great idea.

 

[nutcrackr]

Red Orchestra hasn't been reviewed yet?

 

[ríomhaire]

Metacritic doesn't make the scores.
They collect scores from other site make an average, so it can't be biased.

They can pick and choose where they take the scores from.

 

[Insano]

They can pick and choose where they take the scores from.

Yeah, but they'll use those sites for all the games.

They won't have different sites for every game.

 

[Kadayi]

They can pick and choose where they take the scores from.

OMG...it's all one big conspiracy....call the FBI!!!!

 

[jimmyjam]

I already used metacritic, good stuff

 

[Zaphod_]

This is a fantastic but very surprising move; if (god forbid) Aftermath or any other STEAM game is crap, then Valve will be letting people KNOW it's crap as they go to buy it

 

[$kelet0r]

i love metacritic - i use it nearly every day
good move

 

[dissimulated]

So they hype that Darwinia won an IGF award, but don't mention the HL2 mod award finalists and winner.

Amazing support of the modding community....

 

[Adidajs]

This is a fantastic but very surprising move; if (god forbid) Aftermath or any other STEAM game is crap, then Valve will be letting people KNOW it's crap as they go to buy it

i sincerely doubt that valve will release anything they make themselves that wouldn't get favorable scores from metacritic. CS:CZ was basically farmed out. so i'm not that surprised. this is a developer that is synonymous with quality. if valve's game is crap, they shouldn't be releasing it. Look at TF2. if they really cared about just getting some sales, they would have released that years ago. But they have waited, hopefully making a cool game (in the meanwhile let DICE release their version of tf2, battlefield 2)

 

[smokeythebear]

Red Orchestra hasn't been reviewed yet?

only one review so far

8/10

so three more :|