Game Reviews Don't Matter, Study Finds

Next Generation has an article up looking at a report from SIG, on the correlation between game reviews and sales. Their findings indicate that, while reviews obviously do have some effect on games sold, there just isn't that much of a correlation. From the article: "He said he doubted that publishers and PRs would stop caring about review scores, especially as they matter a lot with consumers who compare games from the same sub-genre — say, basketball games. But he said that, as with last year's report, the report's findings are unlikely to be popular. 'We received a lot of attention but the stats do not lie,' he said."

Comments

Sales != A good quality game

[c0d3h4x0r]

The interesting thing here is that the study only looked at reviews versus sales.

It said nothing about reviews (written by magazines, etc) versus consumer opinions (or user reviews). It also said nothing about consumer opinions versus sales.

In my experience, reviews written by reviewers generally align pretty well with what consumers think of the game, while sales have little to do with either. In short, sales seem to have little to do with how good a game actually is. Sales seem to correlate more with things like movie and cartoon and brand tie-ins to a game, distribution methods, price point, and other such factors. All of this is really no big surprise, since the game industry has always successfully relied on churning out such drivel and it has obviously worked pretty well for them most of the time.

A more interesting thing to study would be what percentage of sales are purchases made by people who know nothing about games and won't be playing the games themselves... such as parents and grandparents choosing games as gifts for kids, etc. I bet they make up more than 50% of sales.

Remember when the Atari era went bust and the bottom of the video games market completely dropped out? My theory is that it was because the industry stopped creating any good-quality games, having realized from experience that they could just produce well-branded crap and rely on all those gullible non-gamer sales. I think the problem is that when the market floods with crap, the gamers (who ultimately receive those games from the purchasers) completely lose interest in games and stop asking their parents to buy them more. So then the purchasers stop buying completely.

In other words, a sufficient minority of titles must continue to be of good quality for the industry to sustain itself, but once that sufficient minority is met, the rest can be crap and the industry can thrive off the crap. The industry then foolishly thinks all it needs to produce is the crap, which kills demand completely, which kills the whole industry.