| Squilliam said: Games with high sales have more of the qualities which appeal to a lot of people. Games which have a lot of qualities which appeal to a lot of people are much higher quality than those which don't. A game which doesn't appeal to you doesn't have a lot of qualities which appeal to you but may have a lot of qualities which appeal to other people. So in a personal sense a game can have few good qualities whilst overall have a lot of qualities which appeal to a lot of other people. In short, just because it appeals or doesn't appeal to the one person doesn't mean that persons quality evaluation is relevant to anyone else. So a single person is an even worse judge of quality than sales. Also like anything you need to qualify qualities, as in 'I respect this person, or I think hes a bit of a fanboy idiot' vs 'did this sell because it was good or because a few million people got duped on launch week'? In general if I was forced to only own the top 10 sales for the Wii I would own, excluding bundles and repeats, full price software:
If I was to own the top 10 Wii rated games I would own, same rules apply:
I see a lot of repeats from one to the other and overall I can't really say that the list of top 10 sales vs top 10 'critically' reviewed is that much different from each other. I wouldn't say that the critically acclaimed software top 10 is any higher in quality than the top 10 by sales of full price unbundled software. Funnily, I was going to do it for 360 but the top was all Gears, Halo and Call of Duty!
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To a certain extent, I think your argument also demonstrates that the similarities and differences between review scores and games may be based heavily on the limited demographic diversity of game reviewers ...
While there are many core gamers who own the Wii, a large portion of Wii owners (and people who are Wii users) are not traditional core gamers; and what they see as a quality videogame might be significantly different from what an 18 to 35 year old single male who loves Call of Duty sees as a quality videogame. Being that the XBox 360 has a more uniform userbase which more closely resembles game reviewers games that review well tend to be the same games that sell well; while the Wii's more diverse userbase means that more games that are not seen as quality titles by reviewers sell quite well.
