Stop reading reviews

[DKHustlin]

Torillian said:

Or it's very well marketed. 

I can agree that selling really well does lead one to assume that a game is at least good or word of mouth would be poor, but not that it's better than some other game that sold less well. 

The only way that you could directly correlate quality and sales like that would be if every consumer was perfectly informed about every possible game purchase, familiarity with the product was counteracted (people buying sequels to games they enjoyed even if they may not be good games), marketting was forced to be uniform and every consumer got to actually try the game before buying.  Otherwise people are just buying the games they hear about and with minimal research think they want.  For every well informed consumer you have 3 or 4 relatives trying to buy presents for their kids based off the recommendations of Bestbuy staff.  Many games that start doing amazing do so based on word of mouth, but that just means that games that sell well and don't suck will continue to sell well or "the rich get richer". 

Now, if you weren't trying to directly correlate sales and quality like that but only saying that a game that sells multimillions is proof that it doesn't suck than I would largely agree.

yea im agreeing with the bold

and im not saying that a game that sold well is better than a game that did not

in fact, there is no empirical way to judge is a game is better when compared to another game, which is another reason why i think reviews should not be read. the score given by a reviewer has no factual bearing on its value, so by not reading them, their influence is diminished, which is the main problem with reviews