Bioshock Developer Hiring Staff Based on Metacritic Scores

A person in entertainment doing things based on reviews is nothing new. However, usually it involves something like “we had reviewers in mind when adding a certain new character or movie plot.”

Irrational basing their entire development strategy on Metacritic scores is a little too crazy for my taste, I like Metacritic and all, but I wonder just how far the BioShock Infinite developer will go to find a new staff member with an 85% Metascore to his or her name.

According to Destructoid, the studio´s requirement list is a bit lengthy, but this current situation asks for the following, “credit on at least one game with an 85+ Average Metacritic Review Score.”

I guess it does not hurt that Irrational wants high quality developers with a history of success. Still, it does exclude the rest of the development team, critical opinion is subjective and does not always indicate whether a game is actually good or bad, and we all know that even the best developers can be hurt by poor decision making by those really in charge. Likewise, a game can be great in spite of a bad creator at the steering wheel, because the team is talented.

Considering that a lot of information goes into making a Metacritic average it still astounds me they are using this as a qualifier to hire someone. However, maybe Irrational should be given the benefit of the doubt since they did make Bioshock after all.