Study Shows Word Of Mouth Makes, Breaks Videogames

Thanks to GameSpot for their analysis of a new Zelos Group study on videogaming, in which it's calculated that "...over 70 percent of respondents say conversations with friends are the primary means for securing information on games." The study co-ordinator elaborates further, reporting that "...face-to-face conversations with friends is the primary source for information about games, with websites coming in second. Instant messaging among friends is probably the second most influential kind of word of mouth communication, and then online forums." However, he has this dire caveat: "Forums offer publishers the most direct influence over word of mouth outside of guerilla marketing techniques, but online forums are inherently full of noise: 'fanboy' rants and antisocial behavior foremost."

Comments

because the Games Press are biased.

[henbane]

Of course people listen to their friends. How is it that game reviews are almost all uniformly over 7/10 even though most of the stuff is trash? If the gaming press had respect for their readers rather than the publishers and junkets people might actually listen to them over what their friends might say.

Re:because the Games Press are biased.

[cgenman]

Agreed

Many readers won't go past the initial two paragraphs in an article. Many Game sites have the annoying habit of starting an article by reprinting the publisher's press release, without even bothering to strip out the obvious factual mistakes... like declaring Grand Theft Auto 3 "Only for the XBox!"

Once you get past that, they're excited about the new hyper-realtime plasma chain-combo burst processed fighting style, which means absolutely nothing except it has a nifty (but forced) combo system. They parrot much of the official publisher line, they love all of new features... They don't yet know how anything actually works after only 3 hours of play, but the guy that gave them the disk said everything was perfect, right?

Games are reviewed by people who want to review games. If someone on your staff is a football fan, you're going to give them NFL 2K4 to review. If they love FPS games, they get the new Half-Life. Neither of these reviews will reflect the opinion of the person sitting on the fence wondering what to buy. How will that guy who has played every other Legacy of Kain game to death feel about the new one? Why, he'll love it, and give it a 9.7. Greatest Game Ever. This, of course, doesn't really help anyone.

If sites are going to be consumer reports, where are the side-by-side comparisons? How does one decide between Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne, Age of Mythology: Titans, and Empires: Dawn of the Modern World? What does one invest their time and money into? If sites are trying to be the next Siskel and Ebert, where are the deep, probing social correlations? Where does Max Payne 2 fit into our societal consciousness? Right now we're still at the level of "This game ROXX!!!!" or "This game SUXX!!!!"

Part of the problem is definitely the quality of writing in online gaming journalism. People grew up expounding on the quality of one game or another, and carry that style into their professional lives. "How did you like such-and-such a game?" "I loaded it up with anticipation, but it sucked. 7.9" Certainly this personal style can be interesting and easy to read, but it leads to a superficial understanding of the situation. Furthermore, it leads to juvenile descriptions of what the reviewers would like to do with the female character's breasts, long-winded sidetracks onto subjects which have little to do with the matter at hand, logorrhea, and plain old fashioned bad grammar.

The most useful part of any magazine was the section where 4 reviewers were constrained to one paragraph and a score, combining directness, succinctness, and judgement. Losing your audience was not an option, as you had very little space within which to formulate an opinion on a game. And no matter how many people you had on staff, you were unlikely to have 4 that happened to be huge soccer game fans. Hype was often balanced by objectivity or downright dourness, and overall the impression left behind of the game was pretty solid.

Sadly, such varied formats have been whitewashed by the world wide web, where page constraints have disappeared. In gaming publication's heyday, there would be a special hype 4-page section for upcoming buzzworthy games, a 1 page section for upcoming games that may or may not be cool, a "quick clips" page for small releases, 1 or 2 page reviews of released games, the 1 paragraph condensed review galleria, a 1 page perspective piece on the industry, a rumors page, letters, and an in-depth strategy guide. Now sites have 4 page reviews, a "news" section that they haven't really focused on since 2000, and strategy guides for subscribers. Only the games that everyone already knows about make it to the front page (Legacy of Kain has been sitting on Gamespot's front page for about a month now), and smaller titles get lost in the shuffle. So much text is generated that the signal is lost in the noise.

If online 'zines are to be relevant again, they need to re-think their formula. Condensed information, available now, from passably elo

useless forums

[Bazzargh]

The thing that really drove it home for me how bad forums are is this set of reviews for Rockstar's Manhunt title - not released until this Thursday.

This site lets users review games before they're even out. As a result, there's a bizarre mix of "10/10 it will r00l", "1/10 this game is sick", along with 10/10s from people who never bothered to change the default rating (and are just asking where to get a demo), and oddest of all, people who rate it from 5-9 based on their understanding of screenshots and rumours.

Worst. Review. Ever.

And I'd just like to take this opportunity to rate Half-Life 3 a 7.5 out of 10 - I expect solid gameplay and stunning graphics, and some nice twists, but to be ultimately left wanting more. Can't wait for its release in, er, 2006.

-Baz

Artificial forum members?

[G4from128k]

I wonder if any companies are fielding artificial forum participants. A bit of programming, a bit of AI, and you could create software that automatically writes short postings to a forum and masquerades as a person. An artificial forum member does not need to pass the Turing test because it does not need to respond coherently to any and all questions.

A business could then spawn multiple copies with different personality tweaks or language usage parameters and let them post freely to online forums. Over the years, such artificial agents would likely become respected and carry great weight with other participants. Of course, these pseudo-posters would have carefully tuned fanboy/troll behaviors that tend to tout the company and trash the competition. Constant presence on the forum and subtle messages would bias the forum's mood toward the company.

Hmmm....are all members of /. real? How do we know?