Review Inflation

[Onyxmeth]

Lostplanet22 said:

Onyxmeth said:

Lostplanet22 said:
Dropping a scoring system could also be very negative. A lot of gamers get interested in a game if they see that it is getting high scores.

Something we saw with the last Need for speed game. Saw a lot of comments (not especially on VGCHARTZ) that people were not interesting in the game because the one before Shift sucked but when Shift got some scores and quite high people got interested in it.

I don't think scoring has anything to do with it.

Here's the PS3 sales of Undercover and Shift. They're flat.

Here's the 360 sales of Undercover and Shift. Shift is trending a couple hundred thousand below Undercover in the same timeframe.

Here's the PSP sales of Undercover and Shift. Shift has only been released in America thus far, so I stuck with only that region for both games. Shift is trending WAY below Undercover.

The reviews are all heavily skewed in Shift's favor across all three platforms, by anywhere from 10-30 points difference. It has done nothing positive for sales thus far, and on 2/3 of the platforms, sales have dropped.

Was not really talking about the sales considering sales could be worse if it had also bad reviews don't want to discuss it but games like batman and okami where games that were out of my radar until I saw many threads a la '(Site's name) scores 9/10 for Okami/batman etc.   If a game that I was not interested in getting high scores I mostly will check reviews out.  Numbers don't matter for me in games I am really interested in or sequels of games that I love....Then the reviews are important for me like Halo ODST.

You said a lot of gamers get interested in games because of high review scores. You then gave the example as Need for Speed: Shift, not me. I merely showed you whatever portion of gamers actually base their purchases in this way, in the case of this game are practically irrelevant to the big picture, thus there is no big negative to dropping a scoring system on reviews.