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

It depends if it's well known and advertised.



 

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I think what your getting at is how does a games quality affect it's sales, cause reviews basically tell you how good a game is. In otherwords, I would say that the better the game is for a wide audience, the better it sells.



Riachu said:
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.

Just what I was going to say.

I do kind of get something like Ico being seen as niche - but Beyond Good and Evil really is one of those puzzling ones.  It released in a popular genre, its creator was reasonably well know due to Rayman, it good great reviews and it offered terrifically varied gameplay (combat, stealth, fighting, vehicles) with nice, easy to master controls, coupled with neat graphics and a well realised setting - in short, on paper it really should have sold well, but it just seemed to die at retail.

I guess that's why Ubi are so 'do we don't we' regarding making a sequel - they're worried history will repeat itself except this time they'll have sunk HD level budget into it.

 



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

Reasonable said:
Riachu said:
Squilliam said:

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.

Just what I was going to say.

I do kind of get something like Ico being seen as niche - but Beyond Good and Evil really is one of those puzzling ones.  It released in a popular genre, its creator was reasonably well know due to Rayman, it good great reviews and it offered terrifically varied gameplay (combat, stealth, fighting, vehicles) with nice, easy to master controls, coupled with neat graphics and a well realised setting - in short, on paper it really should have sold well, but it just seemed to die at retail.

I guess that's why Ubi are so 'do we don't we' regarding making a sequel - they're worried history will repeat itself except this time they'll have sunk HD level budget into it.

 

I guess people don't like pigs.



Tease.

Squilliam said:
Reasonable said:
Riachu said:
Squilliam said:

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.

Just what I was going to say.

I do kind of get something like Ico being seen as niche - but Beyond Good and Evil really is one of those puzzling ones.  It released in a popular genre, its creator was reasonably well know due to Rayman, it good great reviews and it offered terrifically varied gameplay (combat, stealth, fighting, vehicles) with nice, easy to master controls, coupled with neat graphics and a well realised setting - in short, on paper it really should have sold well, but it just seemed to die at retail.

I guess that's why Ubi are so 'do we don't we' regarding making a sequel - they're worried history will repeat itself except this time they'll have sunk HD level budget into it.

 

I guess people don't like pigs.

Ubisoft released it during the holiday season which is death row for new IPs unless you are a shooter or Assassin's Creed.  Add the fact that there was little pre-release hype and very little marketing.  I'm sure a sequel would do well if Ubisoft learn from their mistakes.  Isn't being a cult hit enough to warrent a sequel.  The sequel can sell better than the first game.  MGS2 sold more than MGS1 if I remember correctly.



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I work for a game company. There's been a major correlation with reviews and sales numbers.



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

Reasonable said:
Riachu said:

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.

Just what I was going to say.

I do kind of get something like Ico being seen as niche - but Beyond Good and Evil really is one of those puzzling ones.  It released in a popular genre, its creator was reasonably well know due to Rayman, it good great reviews and it offered terrifically varied gameplay (combat, stealth, fighting, vehicles) with nice, easy to master controls, coupled with neat graphics and a well realised setting - in short, on paper it really should have sold well, but it just seemed to die at retail.

I guess that's why Ubi are so 'do we don't we' regarding making a sequel - they're worried history will repeat itself except this time they'll have sunk HD level budget into it.

 

The problem is that, although reviews provide a huge correlation (and they do. I've seen it). The fact is, there are other factors. BG&E released, as others have stated, at a bad time of the year. In 2008, we saw good-reviewed games sell poorly: Prince of Persia, Dead Space, and Mirror's Edge all come to mind. Very good games with bad sales numbers.



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

Mario Part 8

Why



PSWii

The question isn't "Do reviews affect sales" rather the question is "By how much do reviews affect sales?" If even one person is motivated to buy a game they wouldn't have purchased by a review then we've established a causal relationship (I can vouch for that). However, the existence of highly reviewed but low selling games suggests that the degree to which a review benefits (or hinders) sales is low.

Of course, then we need to take into account how many people read the reviews. If a game is highly visible than more people will read the reviews and base decisions on them (which can go either way). If a game is less visible then fewer people will seek out reviews for it and those reviews will have a smaller overall impact.

In the end, I think there are too many variables to account for to make a decisive conclusion.



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.