Lister
Banned
I have a serious question regarding the apparent drama around game developers tying bonuses to Metacritic scores.
This seems to be perceived as toxic by the gaming community at large, and I don't understand it.
In every job I have ever held there has been some kind of performative metric tied to my ability to earn a raise or receive a bonus of some kind at the end of the year, and I genuinely don't see how this is any different. It is easily the most relevant "metric" you can tie to game development.
I have seen people screeching that it should be based on sales, but that seems way more dependent on your marketing departments ability to sale the game, and less about the quality of the game itself.
Am I completely off base here and out of touch, or am I just seeing a vocal minority making a big deal out of nothing?
Bringing this up because of all the huffing and puffing going on because CD Projekt Red was going to dole out bonuses if the game reached a 90 on Metacritic. (They have since decided to give out a bonus regardless, which is even better!)
Uhm, at your work, is the metric that defines your bonus and promotion potential based on your performance, or on the crappy management of other people and the performance of other teams?
Further is that metric based on some type of objective data points, or is it completely and utterly subjective, where some random dude can change the metric that determines YOUR bonus because, gee I don't know, there was a pandemic happening and your teams game happened to be a little too scary for the snowflake and he'd rather be playing animal crossing...
Not only are these scores very subjective and often times arbitrary, but they often reflect on the management and production at the top, not on the work of say an individual animator or programmer. And those at the top are mlthe most likely to get the larger share of the profits anyway and often don't shoulder the type of extra work time experienced during crunch.
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