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Review Scores the "Least Important Factor" When Buying Games
A recent report from a games industry analyst suggests that among a number of factors leading to the purchase of a video game — such as price, graphics and word of mouth — the game's aggregated review score is the least important measure. Analyst Doug Creutz said, "We believe that while Metacritic scores may be correlated to game quality and word of mouth, and thus somewhat predictive of title performance, they are unlikely in and of themselves to drive or undermine the success of a game. We note this, in part, because of persistent rumors that some game developers have been jawboning game reviewers into giving their games higher critical review scores. We believe the publishers are better served by spending their time on the development process than by 'grade-grubbing' after the fact."
>But we don't do we ?
There is a reason for that. It's a lot of hard work and cost bringing a product to market and generally, the real dogs are killed long before they hit the shelves. I've been reviewing hardware/software for 20 odd years now and I can only remember giving a score of less than 4 a handful of times. Equally, 9 & 10 is rare (for me). The vast majority of stuff is 'good enough' and merits 7 or 8 out of 10. TBH, I get really frustrated by constantly dishing out 7s and 8s and the few times something has turned up for review that's truly bad, I'm been delighted as it gives me a chance to have a real opinion.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
This phenomenon is not unique to Games. I watched a TV Rerun of the Matrix last night and remembered that some Newspaper reviews were very harsh on it. That I would watch it again after all these years and loosing count of how many times I have seen it suggests that the reviewer has standards incompatible with my own. That is not the worse case however.
There was the Mag Innovision letter to the editor after it's 17" monitor received the worst ranking in a roundup of 17" monitors. The Editor's choice award went to a Gateway 2000 monitor. The point of the complaint letter? "This is the same monitor, we just print different labels on the ones we ship to Gateway 2000." Or words to that effect.
So as a general rule I have very little use for published reviews of any product. Word of mouth, and personal trials work best. Also it's good to know what advertisers are allowed to lie about.
"This POS is the best on the market" -: Allowable lie.
"This overpriced crap is great value for money" -: Acceptable lie.
"This 500GB drive holds more data than 750GB of data without using compression" -: dangerous ground.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?