The Xbox App for PC now supports Metacritic scores, but is it the right thing to show?

Some Xbox users have noticed that the Xbox App for PC now supports Metacritic scores when accessing the homepage for a video game on the platform. As shown by Xbox enthusiast, @klobrille, the Metacritic score appears right at the top together with other essential information, and it is one of the first pieces of information you’ll see when accessing a game on the Xbox App.

The feature is not yet widely available, as the Xbox app on our devices, at least, doesn’t show it.

We’re talking about the current version of the app, 2312.1001.18.0, which was released this month. However, it seems that the feature is gradually rolling out to users, as some noted.

Notice this a day or two ago. Started playing rise of the tomb raider. Wow, have I been missing out.

X user

This new capability will be useful to those Xbox users who want to make an informed decision before buying a game. The Metacritic score is often a sign of the quality of a game, however, in many cases, a moderate Metacritic score doesn’t necessarily mean a video game is bad, as some users also noted.

Completely irrelevant in my opinion… Metascore doesn’t mean anything for me and most of the players

X user

Which leads us to ask: Is showing the Metacritic score on the Xbox App the right thing to do?

Xbox App for PC showing the Metacritic score: Good or bad?

Well, it depends. Metacritic usually has two kinds of scores for each piece of media reviewed on the platform. There is the professional score and the user score.

A professional score is the average sum of all the scores given to that piece of media by specialized journalists and reviewers.

And then there is the user score, which is the score given by those users who went through (well, most of the time) the media piece, and formed an opinion based on their experience with the video game, film, book, etc.

The professional score is the one that is shown in the Xbox App, and it’s for the better: reviewers and journalists usually take their time with the product (in this case, the video game) to test it out.

We’re talking about taking a look at the gameplay and then analyzing the story, the mechanics, and the environment. If you want to take a look at what a proper video game review looks like, read some of our reviews: check the review for the survival horror Alisa, or the open-space adventure game Chorus.

Of course, while every video game review strives to be as objective as possible, ultimately it is a subjective piece of criticism that is influenced by the reviewer’s experiences with past video games and so on; with this being said, a bad review of a game doesn’t necessarily mean that the video game is bad. And you can see this in video games that receive a polarized reception.

On the other hand, while the user score on Metacritic would make more sense, it is ultimately driven by subjective opinions, disregarding all objective points. The best example of this is the bomb-reviewing phenomenon: users usually bomb-review a video game when they don’t like specific aspects of it.

Most of the time these specific aspects have nothing to do with the quality of the game itself, which makes the score even more pointless to begin with. While it’s always a good idea to take a look at what others have to say about a video game, don’t take into consideration those reviews that always focus on a specific aspect of the game, as they’re not worth it.

When it comes to Metacritic scores, there are people and people: some prefer the professional scores, while others are more interested in what users have to say. Some don’t buy the game at all, if it has a certain score, while others only buy those with higher scores.

Ultimately, the score has an impact on the decision to buy a certain game, or not, and for many games, this could be an impediment for success.

While showing the Metacritic score on the Xbox App could be seen as an act of transparency from Microsoft, those who don’t have the time to go through reviews but still want to make an informed decision, will trust that score when deciding to buy a game.

This could mean that a lot of really fun and exciting games can be overshadowed by the fact that they don’t have a high score on Metacritic.

I agree that it is a good thing the Xbox App for PC is showing the Metacritic scores, as users will now have every important information available to them, but I do wish more people would be thorough with these scores.

Who knows? Maybe your next favorite video game is one that has a score of 76 on Metacritic. I know that because my favorite video game currently has a score of 70 on Metacritic for its PC version (and I played it on PC).