Investigating Metacritic's Weights

This report is an independent analysis I built after looking into claims about IGN’s outsized influence on Metacritic scores, particularly around the controversy surrounding the game Crimson Tide. Using Claude Code, I reverse engineered a model to estimate how Metacritic appears to weight major publications, with the goal of making a notoriously opaque scoring system more legible. The project sits somewhere between games criticism, data analysis, and platform forensics, turning a public argument about review influence into a structured technical investigation.