Electronic Arts, the world's biggest third party game publisher, has expressed dismay over the average scores of its releases. This comes by way of their Chief Executive Officer - John Riccitiello himself.

It has been pointed out to Riccitiello that the average review scores for EA's recent releases in aggregate site Metacritic has dropped from 77 to 72. The CEO didn't take it lightly and held nothing back in his response.

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

Reviews, as one may guess, have a great influence on how the video game market reacts to products. Scathing reviews could spell the doom of a project that took years to complete.

Analysts and critics have pointed to the EA Sports division of the company as its weakening link. Once known for excellent sports sims, some now look at EA Sports as a factory of annual game rehashes with little more than updated rosters to offer.

This development could not come at a worse time as competition is building up to kick EA off the hilltop. Activision and Vivendi are in the process of merging, while Ubisoft and Take-Two are also shoring up their portfolios.

A score of 72 isn't bad per se, but in a console generation which sees premium games launched at an almost weekly basis, this score is looking more mediocre than ever. We'll see what EA does about it soon enough.