Sales vs. quality

[r505Matt]

Squilliam said:

HappySqurriel said:

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.

Don't you mean divergent rather than diverse userbase for the Wii? I.E. the userbase diverges from the reviewers in that they often have different opinions on the same games whereas the Xbox 360 and PS3 userbase alligns with the reviewers. Arguably the pool of reviewers could effectively be said to be drawn mostly from the Xbox 360 and PS3 console users.

Quality in general is a messy concept because it doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. It even differs significantly if you're taking a meta view on quality in general or specifically pin pointing a single game to a single user in other cases. In most cases where I have seen quality arguments the whole argument fails on the grounds that the two or more people arguing are arguing upon different definitions of quality and thus can never agree or convince the other person which makes the whole thing pointless.

I think one of the important questions isn't sales vs quality, it is the relationship appeal and quality. That is really the question of this thread since by refining the concept of sales to appeal you can cut through a lot of qualifications required when using sales on their own. If art doesn't appeal can it still be called high quality and if art does appeal to a wide audience can it said to be of low quality? This is a question which has grappled the arts for a significantly long period of time. Both sides have strong arguments but I haven't really heard of anyone creating a theory or concept which unifies both positions satisfactorily.

I was going to type something up along these lines, but you already did it for me =) thanks.