Wingfield wrote that Wall Street pays attention to Metacritic and GameRankings because the sites typically post scores before sales data are publicly available, citing the respective rapid rise and fall in company values after BioShock and Spider-Man 3 were released. Many executives say that low scores 'can hurt the long-term sales potential'. He explains its influence as coming from the higher cost of buying video games than music or movie tickets. In 2007, Nick Wingfield of The Wall Street Journal wrote that Metacritic 'influence the sales of games and the stocks of video game publishers'. Metacritic has been used by businesses to predict future sales. In 2022, Red Ventures sold Metacritic and other entertainment websites to Fandom, Inc. In 2020, Metacritic and other CNET titles were bought by Red Ventures. CNET and Metacritic were later acquired by the CBS Corporation. Rotten Tomatoes was already compiling movie reviews, but Doyle, Roberts, and Dietz saw an opportunity to cover a broader range of media. Metacritic was launched in January 2001 by Marc Doyle, his sister Julie Doyle Roberts, and his University of Southern California law classmate Jason Dietz, after two years of developing the site.

Criticism of the site has focused on the assessment system, the assignment of scores to reviews that do not include ratings, third-party attempts to influence the scores, and lack of staff oversight for user reviews. It is regarded as the foremost online review aggregation site for the video game industry. Metacritic won two Webby Awards for excellence as an aggregation website.

A color of green, yellow, or red summarizes the critics' reviews.

The site provides an excerpt from each review and hyperlinks to its source. Before being averaged, the scores are weighted according to a critic's popularity, stature, and volume of reviews. Metacritic's scoring converts each review into a percentage, either mathematically from the mark given, or what the site decides subjectively from a qualitative review. Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc Doyle, and Julie Doyle Roberts in 1999, and is owned by Fandom, Inc. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books.

Tell me why metacritic