Resident Evil Requiem
Capcom
Resident Evil Requiem has millions of players already, and a Metacritic score that has tied it for the best-reviewed game of the year, alongside Mewgenics. But those scores are now at risk of being unfairly increased or decreased with an increasingly prevalent trend: AI-written reviews.
It was noted this past week that formerly reputable outlet, Videogamer, had posted an early Resident Evil Requiem review that almost certainly appeared to be written by AI with an author with a seemingly generated profile picture and no legitimate social media presence. While the score was a 9/10, that’s not the point, and everyone was quickly asking whether Metacritic was going to allow this sort of thing in this era of AI use across the entire internet.
They are not. At all.
Metacritic’s co founder Marc Doyle told me that he had removed both that review and a “handful of others” before issuing a large statement confirming Metacritic’s AI policies:
“Metacritic has been a reputable review source for a quarter century and has maintained a rigorous vetting process when adding new publications to our slate of critics. However, in certain instances such as a publication being sold or a writing staff having turned over, problems can arise such as plagiarism, theft, or other forms of fraud including AI-generated reviews. Metacritic’s policy is to never include an AI-generated critic review on Metacritic and if we discover that one has been posted, we’ll remove it immediately and sever ties with that publication indefinitely pending a thorough investigation.”
In this instance with this specific Resident Evil Requiem review, Videogamer has undergone a huge amount of layoffs and has pivoted to AI content. The site’s header is now “All About Video and Casino Games” if that gives you any indication of where things have gone now. Going on the site now, there are a number of authors that appear to be purely AI, and you can trace them to social media profiles with literally one or two followers. In one of their profiles, the name of the site is spelled incorrectly.
It is promising for Metacritic to take a stand here, and it seems like it may have to do an audit of its outlets to weed out the sites that may be trying to pull this. This isn’t just in gaming, of course, and half the internet seems written by AI now, but in this case, when review scores directly affect sales and sometimes even studio health, it’s genuinely important to get the fakes off the board.
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