Metacritic now charting iOS games

Gaming review aggregation site Metacritic has posted that it is now charting for iOS games through its service. The site has long charted movies, music and video games as an overall average of all the scores found online (out of 100), and now it's going to do the same thing for iOS games. Metacritic will do this by aggregating all of the scores found online with a weighted average and assigning a score out of 100 to each title in the system. You can see the main iPhone page right there -- Tiny Wings is highly rated as a new title, and on the overall list, World of Goo leads the way, with iBlast Moki right behind and a good mix of games on down the list.

As you'd expect from a list of iOS games, the titles are all over the place, from bigger studio releases to tiny indie downloads. The game reviews are also coming from a number of sites of all sizes, from more traditional gaming sites to iOS-specific review sites. Metacritic has become something of a lightning rod in the industry. While it does provide an interesting list of quality titles for each game system, both developers and review publishers are often frustrated that it averages out scores -- and some great games have been brought down in the past by a relatively bad Metacritic score -- for a number of reasons.

We'll have to see what effect Metacritic will have on iOS. I'd think that most iOS users take a lot of their feedback from the iTunes store itself, and when you combine that with the generally low prices of most iOS games, it seems to me that reviews aren't as big a deal as traditional gaming retail. But we'll see -- if nothing else, it'll provide a good list of iOS games for newcomers to the scene.