It has emerged today that along with customer reviews, Amazon will now also show the metascore of a game, to give customers a few more figures to sway their purchases.
Provided by metacritic.com, the metascore is intended to be a more legitimate and balanced source of a product’s worth, though its reliability is still quite arguable. As Metacritic feature both professional ‘critic’ reviews out of 100, and user submitted reviews out of 10, there is a mixed bag of opinions to sift through should you want some insight into a game.
Valve have long since featured Metacritic scores on Steam, which seem to do well to give players a rough guide to how much they will enjoy a game before they buy. In a similar way, Amazon are presumably intending to educate their customers on what they can expect from their purchases.
While metascores are currently only available for certain games and on the US Amazon, it will be interesting to see whether the online retailer rolls out the scores across the board, and just how people respond to this new feature.