In a conference call Thursday, EA seemed pretty worried about the low scores their games have been garnering on Metacritic. The average review score for an EA game has dropped from 77 to 72 over the last year, which EA CEO John Riccitiello says is unacceptable. While Riccitiello says he's not in the business of chasing numbers, those scores still have an impact on games.

Our core game titles are accurately measured and summarized by these assessments, and that is a very big deal.

Marc Doyle, who launched the Metacritic website in 2001, says that the scores being given out by Metacritic are having greater impact on the video game industry in recent years, mostly because people invest so much more time and money in video games than they do in other critiqued media, like movies.

He's got a point, too. I'm much more likely to see a movie critics don't like rather than pick up a video game critics have told me is terrible. Then again, it seems like video game critics hit the mark with game reviews more often than movie critics get it right.

EA concerned with low review scores of its games [GamePro.com]

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