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The Historical Metacritic Games Registry
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About
Capturing the cultural and critical pulse of the gaming industry, these records provide a detailed overview of video game performance across six major platforms: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. By aggregating professional critic scores and community feedback alongside metadata such as developer history and age ratings, the collection offers an expansive look at titles released between 1995 and 2023. It serves as a foundational resource for observing how reception has evolved over nearly three decades of digital entertainment.
Columns
- Name: The official title of the video game.
- Link: The direct web address for the game’s profile on Metacritic.
- Distributer: The company responsible for the distribution and publishing of the title.
- Developer: The creative studio or team that developed the game.
- Release Date: The specific date the game was launched.
- Also On: Other platforms where the same title is available.
- Summary: A brief descriptive overview of the game’s story or mechanics.
- Metascore: A weighted average score derived from professional critic reviews.
- Meta Status: A categorical designation of the Metascore, such as "generally favourable."
- # of Critic Reviews: The total number of professional critics who provided a score.
- Critic Positive/Mixed/Negative: The breakdown of professional reviews by sentiment type.
- Userscore: The average score provided by members of the public.
- Userscore Status: A categorical designation of the public reception.
- # of User Reviews: The total volume of individual user scores submitted.
- User Positive/Mixed/Negative: The breakdown of community reviews by sentiment type.
- Genres: The specific gameplay categories assigned to the title.
- # Of Players: The maximum number of players supported by the game.
- Rating: Age-based content restrictions and classification.
- Awards: Recognition of the game's ranking and performance on the platform.
Distribution
The information is organised into 18 CSV files, with three files dedicated to each of the six covered platforms. These files are split into details, specific scores, and short-form reviews. For the PC platform alone, the details file occupies 4.65 MB and contains 5,291 unique records. The data maintains a 100% validity rate for primary identifiers like names and links, though secondary fields such as awards or player counts may contain null values where information was unavailable. The resource has a usability score of 10.00 and is intended as a static historical archive.
Usage
This resource is ideal for performing longitudinal studies on the reputation of various game developers and distributors over time. It is well-suited for sentiment analysis by comparing the professional critiques found in the reviews files against the numerical scores. Additionally, analysts can use the data to identify "expectation gaps" where professional critic scores significantly diverge from user feedback across different genres and platforms.
Coverage
The geographic and demographic scope is global, reflecting English-language reviews and scores submitted to Metacritic. Temporally, the data spans from April 1995 to February 2023, offering a chronological view of gaming history. The platform coverage is focused on modern and legacy systems, including PC, Nintendo Switch, and the two most recent generations of PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
License
CC0: Public Domain
Who Can Use It
Data analysts can leverage these records to create visualisations of market trends and the rising average volume of reviews over time. Game developers may utilise the sentiment data to benchmark their titles against competitors within the same genre. Furthermore, students can use the clean tabular structure to practice data cleaning and exploratory analysis using libraries such as pandas.
Dataset Name Suggestions
- Metacritic Video Game Scores and Reviews (1995–2023)
- Global Gaming Sentiment and Performance Archive
- Cross-Platform Video Game Metadata and Critic Metrics
- The Historical Metacritic Games Registry
- Multi-Platform Game Ratings and Review Log
Attributes
Original Data Source: The Historical Metacritic Games Registry
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