astrosmash on 24 July 2009
The problem with any investigation of the impact of reviews on the sales of games, is that it would be difficult and extremely subjective to factor out the inherent quality of the game.
That is to say, if you are comparing the sales of two games one of which received a 90% and the other received a 70%, how do you know whether the sales were impacted by the better review or if they were impacted because the 90% was a better game?
I think the only thing you could eliminate the impact of game quality would be to only look at day one sales; though then I should think that the review would be just one cog on the hype machine.
