Cogito

@ Ashurahori: a guy asked me to rate the current consoles to help him decide which to get. i told him to buy the 360 and broke down the details. he assumed that was my console of choice. i told him it wasn't, i hated it and preferred the ps3. he asked why did i tell him to get a 360 if i don't like it. i explained that the 360 works for him because of the library. it fits his taste. 360 doesn't work for me and i gave him some reasons why. he understood at that point and bought the 360.
that's an honest answer/review taking another person's taste into consideration for a sale regardless of my preference. the staff at gamestop were no help, giving him the usual fanboy nonsense but couldn't answer basic questions when comparing the 360 and ps3. too many reviewers come off like the retail monkeys at that gamestop. fanboys that like to drink the koolaide and can't give a rational, sensible review.

i prefer word of mouth from a rational, sensible knowledgeable source for that reason.

Striderhayasa - Phillyyakk on PSN and Live.

@okenny :): like for actual Arcades? WWF No Mercy was my favorite till Here Comes The Pain came out.

Luna

@Striderhayasa - Phillyyakk on PSN and Live.: Look at Mass Effect, the performance issues in that game are pretty harsh, but at the end of the game, it just doesn't matter, if you want me to play a mediocre experiance with the same issues, then it becomes a serious problem.

Iceking5

@Kj719: well Shawn Michaels is WWE's holy man as he prays almost always before the pyro goes off.(born-again christian)

Luna

@Kj719: me too. PS. I've met Bret Hart :P

Luna

@Striderhayasa - Phillyyakk on PSN and Live.: Shadow of the Colossus did very good in terms of sales.

Luna

I just think it's a crying shame how far down the list Orange Box is. On the bright side though, TF2 isn't infested with the usual Xbox Live Idiots(tm).

PositivelyJosh

@ enigma89: great point. many reviewers i just simply don't trust. some reviewers will rip a game for having a bad framerate and bad animation...lowering the score as a result. but will then give a high profile game a great review even though it has the exact same issues. we were talking about this earlier today. then you have the 'flavor of the month' mentality. this is when too many people condemn a game for not playing like the current 'flavor'

example- CoD4/R6 vegas2.

there are people that won't play r6 vegas2 because it doesn't play like CoD4 regardless of a great review. but if r6 played like CoD4, it wouldn't be r6, not very logical. variety....truly is the spice of life. word of mouth from a trusted reliable, knowledgeable source will always be better than any review.

Striderhayasa - Phillyyakk on PSN and Live.

I buy games like 70% of the time because of reviews. like Shadow of the Colossus. Also I've been buying the smackdown games from WWF Smackdown to SvR2008 because 1) I've been a wrestling fan since the Attitude era and 2) because of reviews(which is why I didn't bother renting the raw games on xbox)

Luna

props to the hulk hogan/warrior pics.

jfx316

There are always exceptions to the "rule", but what this really means is that there are few if any absolute standards for a game's quality. Everyone knows that marketing can make up for a whole lot of quality issues, but how to judge a game is ultimately up to the player.

Does this mean that reviews are untrustworthy? Of course not. Professional (or at least knowledgeable) reviewers have the benefit of experience (and dedication) to fairly consider a game, and hopefully influence your purchase decision.

About the only things you can be truly objective about when reviewing a game is if bugs or technical gaffes make it unplayable. Most everything else gets thrown up in the air, particularly for games without a whole lot of differentiation, like sports or racing titles.

unangbangkay

@Kj719: I say "Blunt Head Trauma".
BTW, what does the picture have to do with the article?

Highlander Wolf

According to a friend of mine who makes games, sales are based mainly on marketing. What good reviews do is make sequels possible.

I don't know how true this is, but this is his insider's perspective.

Dorgon

Shouldn't Luke have written this up red-vs-blue style? Don't worry, Luke; I got you...

Loved:
*interesting nonetheless

Hated:
*seven of the games on the top-selling list weren't on the best-reviewed list
*Doesn't really prove anything you don't already know/suspect

All in all, more red than blue. ...you know, if we could colorize our comments.

dan

Well it' pretty much a given that there's always an exception to the rule but it's generally safe to believe that a good review won't hurt game sales while a bad review will. The same way a rocket has to achieve a certain velocity to escape the pull of gravity to send something into orbit, a bad game has to achieve enough hype to break away from the negative reviews to send it into the success. Kane and Lynch I think is an excellent example of this. Is it a bad game? I dunno, never played it... not even the demo but damn those review weren't flattering!

Does any one remember that arcade wrestling game from the early 90's... that was so fun... to bad I don't remember :(

okenny :)

Well here's one hypothesis:
I think it depends on how "hardcore" a game is. The more hardcore it is, the more likely the review will have less of an effect on sales.

That is why alot of those high score games aren't on the top sales list. This is also why Wii games tend to sell well despite getting poor reviews.

The other hypothesis we can draw from this list is that no matter what, good games sell the most. Evidence for this can be found in the fact that only one of the top games with the highest sales has a review under an 8. However, this could also be more of a reflection of how ineffectual review scores are.

jp182

it's good to know that the gaming industry's popularity vs. laudatory patterns doesn't differentiate from that of movies, books or music.

actually, that brings up an interesting point, in that i guess i really am a games snob. while no bad review will stop me from buying a game that i've drank the kool-aid for (Sneak King), i do have a few games bought on pure merit that i haven't even touched yet. meanwhile i own no Oscar-winning films or Nobel-kissed tomes.

ladeeda

Reviews tell you about the quality of the game. Word of mouth is not to be trusted, because hype does stupid things to you, and also fanboyism.

Ashurahori

@Len Bias Cocaine Surplus: What is it with wrestlers becoming preachers nowadays. Ted Dibiase, Shawn Michaels, Ultimate Warrior, and I'm sure many others :oP

Kj719

Dude, the Ultimate Warrior was the absolute fucking shit back in the day! The. Shit.

Strangelove

I always go to the reviews before making a game purchase. I tend not to listen to recommendations from friends, seeing that I know someone that thinks Dynasty Warriors 6 is "awesome."

TOWER_JUNKIE

shadow of the colossus and okami got some great reviews but was terrible at retail just as an example. if gamers aren't willing to give a game a chance, a great review isn't going to help it.

Striderhayasa - Phillyyakk on PSN and Live.

The problem is that reviews give much weight to accessibility, in fact, some reviews will ding a game for being too accessible. If a game's accessible, the sales will be much higher, but it won't do much for the score if anything.

subnet6

Sure only 3 of the games were from the top 10 reviewed, but none of them were reviewed poorly either.

If you add to that the number of highly ranked games that are appealing to a more niche audience, I think the list follows logic.

flamincheney

Let's do another side-by-side comparison.

Split the review/sales statistics by genre, i.e. first person shooters represented this% of the 90%+ review bracket, this% of the 80%+ review bracket, etc. etc.

Then do a demographic review of the review writers who give games a score of 90%+ and their editorial staff, sorted by gender and age. Put the two side by side.

Then we'll reach another obvious conclusion. The 'summarized-as-a-number' review system is useless and neither predicts or encourages sales of games, good or bad. Catering to the kids who want everything as a fraction of 100% is not a fair way to rate games and is a disservice to the rare underpromoted gem of a game that needs serious championing from the major video game review sites out there.

This completes the picture, I think.

Sekai

Reviews are fine in my book as long as you don't consider them holy. Some people won't go and buy a game if it's in the 70s'ish% or low 80s on Gamesranking. I mean you miss on a lot of great games that way. Assassin's creed ( Which I loved by the way... :p ) got 82%, and even the mighty Ikaruga for gamecube got 85%... I know I was thinking that way before. I was buying the games based solely on the review and was almost never playing a game if it's score was lower than 88% or something ridiculous like that.

Also, the opposite of that which I have seen, is people never checking the reviews and buying BS like Sonic Black because well, they "loved sonic 2!!!"...

Then again there is the other part of the bargain. The one we call the wii. You all know what I mean... :p

Malaky

Buy this game brother!

WordMan

The list is actually not that bad. The lowest rated game in the topsellers is 7.2, and that is a NFS title not some Disney shovelware.

Foggynotion

enigma89

Please see: The entire Wii library.

MrAkash

@Kj719: He is an ultra conservative public speaker now for those who don't know.

Leading to the best quote ever of, "queering doesn't make the world go round"

Len Bias Cocaine Surplus

While I think reviews can help and hurt sales of a game, the amount they help or hurt is rather small. I bought Okami pretty much cuz Greg Kasavin sold me on it. Now that's 1 sale more than it would have received, but it still sold pretty poorly.

Anecdotal evidence never accounts to anything, but I still think this idea of mine can become a hasty generalization. Of truth though.

ItotheCtotheE

Well there really isn't any big suprise there ! The only one is NFS:Pro Street, I thought that serie had stopped selling after Most Wanted !

Well I do have NFS: Carbon but that was a step mom christmas gift ... She was so glad to buy me a game for my new little wii ...

Shteve

male roof blower

I miss the Ultimate Warrior :_(

Kj719

I just go with whatever Gorilla Monsoon tells me.

Len Bias Cocaine Surplus

I base a majority of my game buys on reviews. I hate to say it, but if im going to spend 50+ dollars on a game, i want to know what others think first.

Luuey

@male roof blower: That thinking made me buy Assassin's Creed, not so wise a choice there...

Iceking5

male roof blower

@ Luna: it did? i read otherwise. link?

Striderhayasa - Phillyyakk on PSN and Live.

I tend to buy my video games on old systems at big discounts. So I'll buy an Xbox 360 in 2010 or so and pay $150 for it. All of the great games will be obvious at that point, and they'll be new to me.

I bought a GameCube for cheap in the summer of 2006, and picked up a handful of A+ games for less than $15 each. I feel like it was a pretty good investment to go that way, and helps separate the wheat from the chafe.

And, by the way, there is no type of story that cannot in some way be represented by iconic moments in professional wrestling.

DGUW

@ Iceking5: check my last post....it comes down to taste. Mass Effect might be great to you regardless of said issues, but that a dealbreaker for me. for all intents Mass Effect is mediocre to me because i have no desire to buy it because of the issues. Same for GTA:SA, Oblivion and a few other popular games that people were pimping as teh grEatezt eVaR! but had glaring flaws. case in point...a fps that's on ps3 and 360....i'm buying the ps3 version provided it's not busted. ps3 has splitfish support and m/kb in UT3. on 360 i'm a slave to less skillful auto-aim and dual analog clumsiness. this doesn't matter to many people, but it matters to me regardless of whether my choice is popular or not. you have to do what works for you.

Striderhayasa - Phillyyakk on PSN and Live.

Uh, this is pretty much the best (read: most ridiculous) wrestling promo of the 90's, and it was during the build-up to the match used in this photo:

+ Watch video

KaneRobot

But in relation to the article at hand, I will want to buy games based on develops and/or directors, Team Ico perfect example. Or if a game's on sale I may get it. Reviews let me know if I should rent it to see for myself.

gunstarhero

@Highlander Wolf: Wrestlers are known for "selling" themselves, ie. the pain, the glory and all that. Some may call it acting, but that's a whole other can of worms.

gunstarhero

male roof blower

@Kj719: same here buddy.

foodnaptime

I can't believe everyone didn't buy La Boite Orange. I bought it just for Portal, but I finally started Half Life 2, and having never really be enamored with any FPS, I'm completely enamored with this one. I can't believe I got this AND Portal, and two more HLs for the price of one game.

kingclip

Haven't the huge-budget games already proven the fact that brand image and huge advertising campaigns are what sells games?

For those games without that kind of a budget, yeah... the demographic that reads reviews will end up being a little more important.

muu

@male roof blower: An interesting point. You know, that's something I've always wondered about, though it rarely seems to happen in practice: lowering prices! I mean, it's basically the entire premise of capitalism that when given the option to pay more or less for equally good merchandise, the people will pay less. Why doesn't a publisher start by cutting game prices ten or fifteen dollars? This might jump-start the kind of buying they're looking for. Now, I don't suggest selling the games at a loss, ala how most consoles are sold, but lower prices always jump-start sales. The less you make off of each title will easily be offset by the larger volume you move. This from someone that works in retail :)

Of course, I could be way off base, but I find it hard to believe that publishers wouldn't be able to offset lower prices with increased volume. Now, most of the time the crazy good sales, the bargain-basement stuff are "loss leaders," ie, selling an item at a loss in order to promote sales of more profitable merchandise. This example holds true for the consoles; the consoles are sold at a loss to promote the sales of the much more profitable software. Modern US retail is littered with such examples: selling printers at a loss so that ink becomes the real money maker, selling laptops at a loss so that software and overpriced bags pump up the bottom line. I'm not suggesting the same be done with games...if everything was sold at a loss, then no money would be made...but a marginal price drop, large enough to be noticable and enticing, yet at the same time small enough not to affect the bottom line; I think such a maneuver would be quite effective for sales, not to mention the fact that at lower prices more games would become accessible and newer IP's could easily sprout and/or take root.

You may think I've summed up Nintendo's strategy in a nutshell, but I refer only to pricing and not to the actual IP's themselves (what might be attractive to hardcore vs. casual gamers) but that's a whole nother argument in itself.

Cogito

I play games that I like. :( 7 out of the 10 games on my fav of '07 wasn't on either of their list.

Voteforme2020

@Sekai: Games like Okami, Zack and Wiki, Ikaruga, Puzzle Quest, and many others all got fantastic review scores, but that doesn't change the fact that Need for Speed: Prostreet, which was largely panned by critics, outsold them all combined.

Also, when you look at the percentage of fps's out of the total number of games with 90%, you have to also consider what percentage of games were fpses an what percentage of money spent in the industry was on fpses. Back fifteen years ago you would likely see 2D fighters dominating the review charts, but you'd also find that they dominated the number of games made and the budgets spent at the time.

A review score is a fine metric as long as what it means is accurately described. If you go to an aggregate site and feel that, while a game scored in the same numerical range from multiple sites, but they all meant different things, don't use the aggregate score. Most reputable sites that use scores will have a score guide as well as a full text review with every game. Finding a site (or specific reviewer) you trust is a good idea, especially when combined with reading the full text review and considering the meaning of their score in context of the score guide.

One site's gauge of a seven might be a game that will be loved by a genre's hardcore fans, but not by many others. An eight might be a game that is loved by most who like the genre, and a nine might be a game that people from all walks of gaming might like, even if they're not normally fans of the genre, which sheds a lot more light on why great games (which is often what an eight stands for) get eights, because they don't have universal appeal, which is that site's criteria. The problem starts when people mentally assign the out of ten score to a grade, and assume that an eight means a B instead of an eight meaning a "fantastic game for fans of the genre." It is this assumption, not the scores in and of themselves, that is the problem.

Nirolak

@Cogito: I bet more advertising would probably help out more too, as there are plenty of good games that don't get much play simply because of advertising. Though, some games don't even need that if the price is right. I don't recall commercial one for the original Katamari, but lo and behold, it picked up steam and became a hit, and I think it started at a $30 price tag if I'm not mistaken.

I've always wondered why gaming studios bother to 'hype' titles that don't need it. It seems like such a giant clusterfuck of advertisement to display games that, for all intensive purposes, are going to be blockbuster sellers the moment they go into production. Case in point- GTA IV commercials have been on constantly now... and yet, every commercial as far as I'm concerned up to this point is a waste of cash. I understand why movies can be so heavily advertised, movies are usually only around in a theater for a month, possibly more if they still pull in patrons, before they're replaced by new ones. It's a short window, and you need to tell people about it. But games? It seems to me that games would probably cost less in general if advertisement was done when a product is available. So what if your game doesn't do millions that first week. If the numbers at the end of it's life are the same either way, wouldn't it save money in production (and in turn, cost less to purchase.) to not dole out so much in advertising budget before the product is even out?

Ampillion, will tipe wurds four moneys.

Ads = sales, not reviews. Duh.

Gospel X

@Gospel X: I agree, but the interesting thing is that positive reviews are in a certain respect, an advertisement for a game, hence their importance to producers. This is how you end up with all the controversy surrounding Gamespot being so sensitive to the industry. If you have significant marketing dollars earmarked for a game, then couple that with a good review, and you might get a multi-million seller. The same dollars devoted to a mediocre game, unfortunately, will also result in strong sales, but maybe not millions. (See: Electronic Arts)

ibelli

@PositivelyJosh:

i agree. it proves alot of people who play games a just doofus heads, looking for the next big hyped game.

yea you know who you are. doofus.

bighit006

Why on earth would reviews have any meaningful impact on game sales eoither way?
Who reads reviews?
I know we do, after all we're the kind of nerds who are here at Kotaku, not just reading but commenting, but seriously, we're such a small percentage of the market.
Wanna hear something really scary?
I bet that the guys working behind the games counter in Wal Mart have more of a direct influence over sales than all the reviews put together.

Cruithne

@Cruithne: I know it's not what the article said, but IMO the relevant point isn't whether reviews have a meaningful impact on game sales - the point is whether quality has an impact on game sales. The average review scores on sites like metacritic are the only way to obtain an objective numerical indication of quality of games, which is required if you are going to do any comparison of quality and sales. The actual influence on sales could be seeing the game somewhere else, hearing about it from your friends, knowing that the previous game from that series was a quality title so the next one probably will be, etc. - not literally reading reviews, but every method of making a decision that might bear any relation to the quality of the game rather than its marketing.

Unfortunately I think the original article also missed the statistical point. What's the point in doing a top ten comparison? Everyone knows Madden is going to be in it. There are people who like American football, these people buy games, how many American football games are there that were better reviewed than Madden? So that certainly doesn't indicate some kind of failure of the nation's critical faculties. Even more to the point, the 'bottom 10' games they're looking at are still reasonable sellers, so I don't know what they were hoping to gain from that.

More useful data along the same lines could be obtained by drawing a scatter plot of the sales numbers from that top 100 on Y axis against review scores on X axis, but this would still suffer from the issues mentioned above. To be honest I think you'd really need better data - sales numbers for everything, not just a top 100, would be nice...

quen

The Ultimate Warrior vs. Hulk Hogan. Man, I miss the Ultimate Warrior...

However, reviews aren't going to affect sales. Just like Brawl and just like GTA. The people who were going to buy it are going to buy it anyways, no matter what other people think about it.

KM91

I saw that article, too, and now that I see it re-posted here, I can't help but think about it in hindsight here...

What about previews? Do previews sell games more than reviews do?

I mean, does anyone remembers the advertising fiasco where the Kane & Lynch site quoted excerpts from previews of the game (including Kotaku)?

Previews often speak to the potential a game has -- which often ends up going unrealized. If every game published came out as good as its preview sounded, all games would be awesome.

So the real question, to me, is: forget review scores. Most purchases of new games are arguably made before the review publishes anyway. What about the previews?

BtownDesignGuy

Millions of consumers = fail :(

doesntlikedede

Reviewes don't sell anything.

Music sells because people listen to the songs in Radio Formula or think the singer is hot or whatever.
Movies sell because people see screeners, ads or knows the actors are fun or hot.
Games sell because people recognize names from a saga or because they have seen graphics some where. Or because the producer of the game is good-looking.

So, what does sell? What is known and SEX. Not reviewes. Simple.

There is, however, a small part of the population that rely on reviews.
I read online reviewes of movies, buy independent film magazines and check filmaffinity critics;
I read allmusic and check my last.fm recommendations (and download music) to see if a record is worth purchasing;
I read a lot about videogames to find games with interesting ideas and watch trailers and gameplay videos to see if a game has achieved what I expected from it before buying.

But people like me is barely enough to keep alternative markets alive. Nothing like what the big corps expect to earn. What makes Quantic Dreams happy is laughable according to EA standards, and so they rely on different marketing systems.

EloraHRanma

The ultimate warrior was awesome!

radink360