Bodhesatva said:
Sales, metacritic, and legs (As in, how long it sells for) would be the three I'd point to. They are reasonable metrics for quality, and I believe they suffice to reach consensus in clear cases. |
Okay, so, let's break that down a bit with an example.
Professor Layton is averaging over an 85% on gamerankings. We'd all agree that's within range of being considered quality by reviewers. It's sold 40K in a week in NA. Far below the rate most consider successful. On the other hand in Japan it's sold almost 900K, and was also reviewed highly. We can't check legs for North America yet so we'll leave that out.
In Japan it's got 2/2 qualifications for quality. In America only 1/2. Is it a better game in Japan than America? Should 18 reviewers really be a meassure of the average opinions of tens of millions of gamers? You yourself pointed out that there is a huge disconnect between reviewers and the current gaming market. Are you saying you now consider them a valid meassure of quality? And who are they a meassure of quality for? My Mother wouldn't enjoy Halo, but she loves Nintendogs.
There are far too many factors here Bod. At best, we could try and divide everyone into categories to meassure quality for individual markets, but even then there are a lot of variables, and there is an entire genre of games (mini/casual) that doesn't have a single highly reviewed game in it. Is there no quality at all in the genre? By your own suggested standards of meassurement there are not.
I have no problems getting into a discussion of standards of opinion on quality of games with you. Comparing my opinion to yours, and defending my own. I will do that with anyone, but there is no good standard of meassure for a categorical discussion of "good" and "bad" in video game quality.
