Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books.

The site also includes a summary from each review and links to the original source, using colors like green, yellow, or red to indicate the overall sentiment of the critics.

[4] Rotten Tomatoes was already compiling movie reviews, but Doyle, Roberts, and Dietz saw an opportunity to cover a broader range of media.

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.

[5] In an interview with The Guardian, Marc Doyle cited two major publishers that "conducted comprehensive statistical surveys through which they've been able to draw a correlation between high metascores and stronger sales" in certain genres.

He claimed that an increasing number of businesses and financial analysts use Metacritic as "an early indicator of a game's potential sales and, by extension, the publisher's stock price".

Columnists took issue with the company's use of Metacritic, with one suggesting that this makes game critics ultimately accountable for deciding the developer's profits and another pointing out that a Metascore of 84 is not significantly lower than 85.

Along with other executives, in 2008, John Riccitiello, then CEO of Electronic Arts, showed Wall Street analysts a chart illustrating a downward trend in the average critical ratings of the company's games.

Stuart wrote: "The Metascore phenomenon, namely Metacritic and GameRankings, have become an enormously important element of online games journalism over the past few years".

[9] Doyle said that because video games lead to a greater investment of time and money, gamers are more informed about reviews than are fans of film or music; they want to know "whether that hotly anticipated title is going to deliver".

[9] In June 2018, Metacritic established the "Must-See" label for a movie that "achieves a Metascore of 81 or higher and has been reviewed by a minimum of 15 professional critics".

[19] In September 2018, it added the "Must-Play" certification for video games attaining a score of 90% or more, and a minimum number of 15 reviews from industry professionals.

There are about two dozen 97-rated games with standouts including Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto V.[22] There are fourteen movies that have received a 100: Tokyo Story; The Godfather; Citizen Kane; Rear Window; Casablanca; Boyhood; Three Colors: Red; Vertigo; Fanny and Alexander; Notorious; Lawrence of Arabia; Dekalog; The Leopard; and The Conformist.

[9] Joe Dodson, former editor at GameRevolution, criticized Metacritic and similar sites for turning reviews into scores that he found to be too low.