How much do REVIEWS affect sales?

[Riachu]

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.