Game scoring site wields industry clout

By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - John Riccitiello, head of Electronic Arts, is showing a chart to Wall Street analysts and he is not happy.

This chart, Riccitiello grouses, shows the one metric that has most frustrated him since he took over the world's largest video game publisher nearly a year ago.

It doesn't show the company's falling operating profit or sliding market share. Instead, it shows the average score for EA's video games on Metacritic.org, a Web site that distills a pool of reviews for a given game down to a single number.

What has Riccitiello worked up is that EA's average score fell last year to 72 from 77.

"There is nothing acceptable about that," Riccitiello says. "Our core game titles are accurately measured and summarized by these assessments, and that is a very big deal."

"So this is perhaps, to me, the most important chart in this presentation, we need to recover here."

Throughout EA's investor day last week, Riccitiello and other executives referred frequently to Metacritic, underscoring just how influential the site has become in the $18 billion U.S. video game industry.

Launched in 2001 by Marc Doyle, his sister Julie Doyle Roberts and Jason Dietz, a former classmate at University of Southern California's law school, Metacritic is now a part of online technology media company CNET Networks.