Metacritic Is Changing Its User Rating System After The Last of Us Part II Scandal

Players often use rating systems for review bombing on various venues such as Steam and Metacritic. Steam has its own kind of regulation rules: only the owners of the game can wtite a review. Metacritic has previously had no tools to regulate such “crusades.”

However, after the scandal last month with The Last of Us Part II, when it was bombed with low reviews mere hours after the release, the aggregator has started changing its system.

Some new games like Catherine: Full Body Edition for Nintendo Switch and Superliminal for consoles have their user scores temporarily disabled. There’s a special notice: “Please spend some time playing the game” and “Come back to review it starting at 12:00 p.m. PST on July 9.”

Apparently, you can no longer leave feedback on Metacritic in the first 48 hours after release. Seems like it will be applied for all new releases to come.