Raphael Colantonio believes that Metacritic hinders the creation of complex and risky games, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 became the best-selling game in the U.S. for October, and World of Warcraft turned 20 years old — here are the main events in the gaming industry from the past weekend.
World of Warcraft
- The founder of Arkane Studios, Raphael Colantonio, criticized the review aggregator Metacritic. He claimed that the ratings on the platform often do not reflect the true quality of the games, and the Metacritic ecosystem encourages developers to create safe and bland projects. “If a game is polished at launch, you’re guaranteed 80 points, no matter how boring it is. Meanwhile, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 got 73 points because it had rough edges at launch. This is unfair and misleading,” wrote Colantonio on social media platform X. He added that 70 points on Metacritic may equally denote both a mediocre game and a fantastic game with bugs in the release version. As noted by the expert, many of his favorite games do not have sufficiently high ratings for this very reason: Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines has 80 points, Fallout: New Vegas has 82-84 points, and Alpha Protocol has 63-73 points depending on the platform.
- In October 2024, U.S. residents spent $4.2 billion on video games, gaming hardware, and gaming accessories, calculated the analytics company Circana. This is 12% more than the previous year. The best-selling games of the month were Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO, and the remake of Silent Hill 2, with the new Call of Duty also reaching third place in the sales top for all of 2024. Looking at console sales separately, they continued to decline — revenue from console sales in the U.S. fell by 23% in October to $249 million. Revenue from Nintendo Switch sales dropped the most — by 38%, PlayStation 5 fell by 20%, and Xbox Series by 18%.
- In a conversation with IGN, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella reported that Dragon Age: The Veilguard had a good, but not outstanding, start in the U.S. Despite releasing at the very end of the month, it managed to rank sixth in the October top-selling games in the country, even though Circana did not have full data and only considered console sales for this game, whereas for many other games, PC sales were also considered. Nonetheless, in its debut week, Dragon Age: The Veilguard sold worse than Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth and Dragon's Dogma II. The analyst is unsure whether the new Dragon Age can achieve the same sales figures as Dragon Age: Inquisition once did, but he acknowledges that little time has passed since the game's release, and much could still change.
- On Saturday, World of Warcraft celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Its release took place on November 23, 2004, and became one of the most iconic in Blizzard Entertainment's history. For instance, in 2008, World of Warcraft was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most popular MMORPG, with an active audience exceeding 10 million people at the time. According to Blizzard Entertainment's estimates, by November 2024, players worldwide had spent over a billion hours in World of Warcraft.
*Circana provided data for the period from October 6 to November 2, 2024.