Everyone's a Critic

Obviously it's a problem. There's a couple of ways you can compile the information. You can do it by hiring an employee to go out and track all this stuff down from official channels or you can use user submissions, people who've actually worked on these games and they go through GameFAQs and register on the site and fill out an account and submit their stuff. I think that some people are going to be forthcoming and certain people aren't.

That could certainly be part of the problem. The issue here is individual people. You can click on Capcom, but you can also click on the development company but it's very tough. We've found it very tough in some cases to say who has been responsible for a game. We're constantly having to clean our data to know exactly which development house actually created something.

I think that is an issue, of the industry not needing or not wanting to put that information out there.

I think that is an issue, of the industry not needing or not wanting to put that information out there. I don't know exactly what's behind that, I haven't discussed that with too many publishers.

I think if you were going to try and do some sort of actual ranking, like "here are the best directors" you'd have to make sure that all the credits are on an even playing field. If you started doing it with actors and a particular actor had a bit part versus another actor who had a leading role that will always be an issue.

But again our collection of that data was not for ranking purposes, it was just more for, "what has this person worked on so I can discover more products". But there is an issue, whether you can evaluate these people, one to the other, based on varying degrees of input on a product.

We have no plans to bring it back. Right now we just want to see if we can build the database, take a shot at it, see what we can do. And we're still encouraging our users when they see those pages to please, help us. And then we'll see one day if we can get to a point where that section is beefed up.

I have no idea. I couldn't even tell you if we could get to a point where it would be necessarily fair to bring back scores. It would take looking at it again down the road. Months, years... we'll see where it goes.

If by this issue coming about in the last week all of a sudden the publishers and developers are like: "Yes, let's standardise this whole system", and everyone wanted to go out there and in every game attach their credits, then we could hire someone to simply input that into our system. But... I don't necessarily see that happening and I don't think you see that happening.