How much do REVIEWS affect sales?

[Reasonable]

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.