EEDAR and the Guildhall at SMU released a new study (download it here) on how professional review scores affect purchase intent. There is a correlation between positive reviews helping to drive sales, however it isn’t a direct relationship (but we already knew that). The interesting part is that people not exposed to review scores rated things higher than the media and had higher purchase intent. My takeaway is that if your game isn’t great, don’t send out copies to the media for review and you’ll have more sales.
VentureBeat wrote about EEDAR’s analysis of the top selling games of the past three years and their correlating average MetaCritic score. It shows that games don’t necessarily sell due to a high Metacritic score.
The basic flaw with the Metacritic and GameRankings systems is that they don’t actually provide a gauge for mass-market consumer reviews of a title. Take games like Ubisoft’s PETZ line which sold well. The games reviewed pretty poorly in the games media and most of the games in the line have low MetaCritic scores. The industry needs a tool that can take into account mass-market interest and the reviews an average person would give the game, who isn’t a core gamer.
