“What’s important to us is putting the games out that we want to put out.”
Goichi “Suda51” Suda says game companies are too hung up on how their games perform on Metacritic.
Talking to our sister site, GamesIndustry.biz, Suda said that whilst he will check scores when a game releases – “Sometimes a media outlet has given us zero. That makes me feel shitty – why go that far and give us zero?” – but apart from that, he “tries to avoid Metacritic”.
“Everybody pays too much attention to and cares too much about Metacritic scores. It’s gotten to the point where there’s almost a set formula – if you want to get a high Metacritic score, this is how you make the game,” Suda said.
“If you’ve got a game that doesn’t fit into that formula, that marketability scope, it loses points on Metacritic. The bigger companies might not want to deal with that kind of thing. That might not be the main reason, but that’s certainly one reason why. Everyone cares too much about the numbers.
“Personally, I don’t care too much about the Metacritic numbers,” he added. “I’m not really conscious of them. What’s important to us is putting the games out that we want to put out and having people playing the games we want them to be able to play.”
Ed sat down with Suda and fellow titan of Japanese development Shinji Mikami at Gamescom to talk about their work together, the importance of remasters as part of game preservation, and if there are any games from their past they’d be keen to remake.
The remaster of 2011 action-adventure Shadows of the Damned is set to release this Halloween on PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. It’s a cult-classic demon-shooting game written by Suda 51 and produced by Mikami.
