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Forums - Sales Discussion - How much do REVIEWS affect sales?

Most games that get really high reviews (over 9.0) sell pretty well. Most games that are rated over 9.6 on IGN sell very very well.

 

Some games get reviews in the 7's and low 8's and still sell very good. Assassins Creed and Prototype come to mind.

 

However if they got better reviews, they probably wouldve sold alot more.

 

 

How much of an affect do you think reviews have on sales?

 

 



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Depends how well known the IP is.



Good reviews is everything.

If a game gets 90% it will sell at least twice as much than if it got 80%.



The correlation usually is: The top sellers are very likely highly reviewed, in every console, but being well rated isn't garantee of great sales. But it does help to being well reviewed. Look at GTA IV. If people were fair, it would have got a good 89% in metacritics and would have sold 8mln across plataforms, instead of 13+ across PC, PS3 and x360.

I reckon reviews work better(to help sales) on high profile titles, but not so well in more niche and unknown titles. Look at Blazblue. Well reviewed, got the atention of more gamers then it would otherwise. But will likely not sell like SCIV and MK vs DC, wich got lower reviews.

It will be interesting to read this report that IoI said they're doing. Looking forward to it.



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There will always be outliers, but in general good reviews will show a good correlation with good sales.

Occasionally bad reviews will be ignored, but this is less common - notably exceptions are movie tie in titles, etc.

Sometimes good reviews will be ignored (Ico, Beyond Good & Evil, etc) and those who play the games scratch their heads and wonder why the majority are so keen to miss out on such great titles.

So in general the better the review the better the potential sales.

Now go buy Beyond Good & Evil so Ubi can commit to the sequel.



Try to be reasonable... its easier than you think...

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@ Reasonable

This(good games not selling) usually happens when the title is not very well Known, or belongs to a niche genre. More Ads and word of mouth would do the trick. Of those two, ads are of course the more effective, since Valkyria showed us that no ammount of personnal propaganda, like we are doing in this site, will help the game sell what we think it deserves(IMO, 4-5mln, or 0,8 in 10 PS3 owners at the end of the Gen)



VASCO DA GAMA CAMPEÃO DA COPA DO BRASIL!!!

CONGRATULATIONS VASCÃO

VICE É O CARALH*

 

PLAYSTATION®3 is the future......NOW.......B_E_L_I_E_V_E

Reasonable said:
There will always be outliers, but in general good reviews will show a good correlation with good sales.

Occasionally bad reviews will be ignored, but this is less common - notably exceptions are movie tie in titles, etc.

Sometimes good reviews will be ignored (Ico, Beyond Good & Evil, etc) and those who play the games scratch their heads and wonder why the majority are so keen to miss out on such great titles.

So in general the better the review the better the potential sales.

Now go buy Beyond Good & Evil so Ubi can commit to the sequel.

Those good reviewed titles are also pretty inaccessible or only cater to a smaller niche of the market. Reviewers will often overlook complicated, overly difficult controls or place too much emphasis on graphics, things which don't seem to corelate strongly with strong sales. Or they will pay too much attention to innovation which again doesn't corelate well with sales.

The more a game does the basics right, the better reviews and sales corelate from what I have seen.



Tease.

Games that appeal to "core" gamers and get high review scores sell very well, it seems. The more casual fare can get reviewed into oblivion and still sell well...
For people who keep themselves updated on the latest news and spend a lot of time on gaming, people like us members here, I think reviews are very important.
I find myself agreeing less and less with reviews though, this gen is full of games with amazing scores that I've found severely lacking, boring or plain bad.



ioi said:
Like I say, it depends on genre.

In general, sales can be forecast fairly accurately from:

- Genre
- Average review score
- Marketing budget

So a fitness game will have far greater dependancy on marketing budget than review score, but a first person shooter will have a strong dependancy on review scores as well.

Of course there are outliers, but most research firms use models based on these main factors and they normally work pretty well.

 

^^

Yeah I know, my main area of expertise is demand forecasting and optimization in retail - which is close but not quite in line with the common techniques used to forecast games, DVDs, etc.

 

Right now from a retail perspective the focus seems to be:

 

  • genre
  • artist/developer
  • anticipated rating
  • previous titles (if franchise or similar)
  • promotional placement/investment
  • time of year
  • number of competitive titles
  • additional demand influencers (is is related to anything else in market that could affect demand

Most of the above would have weighting depending upon the genre/title - so as you say an FPS will have different weightings than an RPG or a Fitness title.

But often media is vendor managed inventory for most retailers, so I haven't got to play with that type of data as much as food, electronics, apparel, etc.

 



Try to be reasonable... its easier than you think...

Squilliam said:
Reasonable said:
There will always be outliers, but in general good reviews will show a good correlation with good sales.

Occasionally bad reviews will be ignored, but this is less common - notably exceptions are movie tie in titles, etc.

Sometimes good reviews will be ignored (Ico, Beyond Good & Evil, etc) and those who play the games scratch their heads and wonder why the majority are so keen to miss out on such great titles.

So in general the better the review the better the potential sales.

Now go buy Beyond Good & Evil so Ubi can commit to the sequel.

Those good reviewed titles are also pretty inaccessible or only cater to a smaller niche of the market. Reviewers will often overlook complicated, overly difficult controls or place too much emphasis on graphics, things which don't seem to corelate strongly with strong sales. Or they will pay too much attention to innovation which again doesn't corelate well with sales.

The more a game does the basics right, the better reviews and sales corelate from what I have seen.

How is Beyond Good and Evil inaccessible or only cater to a smaller niche?  It's an action/adventure game which is one of the most, if not the most, popular genres in gaming.