In a recent meeting with Wall Street analysts, EA boss John Riccitiello has stated that the company’s dropping average review score is the most important problem facing the firm.

Reuters reports much of Ricitiello’s presentation concerned review aggregation site Metacritic, whose average score for EA’s software in 2007 fell from 77 per cent to 72 per cent.

"There is nothing acceptable about that," he stated. "Our core game titles are accurately measured and summarised by these assessments, and that is a very big deal.

"So this is perhaps, to me, the most important chart in this presentation, we need to recover here."

Metacritic has seen its importance to the game industry grow in recent times, with Marc Doyle (Metacritic co-creator alongside sister Julie and Jason Dietz) stating: "We never created Metacritic as an industry kind of thing. It was always for educating the user.

"I used to get stuff from companies reviewed by what they considered inappropriate critics, like a UK publication reviewing a 'Madden' game saying ‘how are they qualified to review football?’"