THE BUZZ: Telltale developers were recently caught inflating user reviews on Metacritic. Gamespot broke the the story last Thursday when they reported that two Telltale employees, one a user interface artist, the other a cinematic artists went to Metacritic and gave the recently released Jurassic Park: The Game, perfect 10 scores. The investigation process didn’t take long, according to Gamespot, a quick Google search revealed a connection between the users and their Linkedin accounts, revealing they were in fact Telltale Games developers.

When questioned about their policy of employees scoring their own games the publisher had this to say: ”Telltale Games do not censor or muzzle its employees in what they post on the Internet. However, it is being communicated internally that anyone who posts in an industry forum will acknowledge that they are a Telltale employee. In this instance, two people who were proud of the game they worked on, posted positively on Metacritic under recognizable online forum and XBLA account names.”

EGM’s TAKE: The topic of Metacritic is a polarizing one. While many find it to be a useful tool for aggregating scores, others believe it devalues objectivity in written reviews. With that being said the statement Telltale made was precisely what was needed. An army of worker bees can review anything they want for all we care, as long as they allow for regular users, the group that finds Metacritic useful, to parse out what may in fact be a bias opinion. Transparency is incredibly important in this day and age. In this instance, we’re not entirely certain those employees were making it clear what side of the fence they sat on.

Source: Gamespot