Investigating Metacritic's Weights

An independent investigation into how Metacritic weights game review scores, built after the controversy around IGN's apparent outsized influence on aggregate ratings for Crimson Desert. I used Claude Code to reverse-engineer a model estimating how Metacritic appears to weight major publications.

The goal was to make a notoriously opaque system more transparent. What started as curiosity about a single game review turned into a structured technical investigation sitting somewhere between games criticism, data analysis, and platform forensics. The full report is available as a PDF.