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Concerning Wii Sports being a niche game, I tried to explain in my last post that it wasn't really one, but that it had the important properties of one. It gets generally average review scores and only appeals to a small portion of a website's (Gamespot's, for example) reader base. It's a niche game as far as the readers of such sites are concerned, and so it's a niche game as far as the sites are concerned.

I'm somewhat confused concerning your second paragraph - perhaps I'm not understanding something. You say that people who are willing to write user reviews ought to have opinions in line with the professional reviewers, but I don't see why this should be so. To bring up Mega Man again, Gamespot's X8 written user reviews are overwhelmingly glowing (9+ range) relative to the critical review (6.8). I believe there's still strong self-selection bias at work - very few people are going to write a user review essentially agreeing with a 7.0-ish score for a game, while quite a few people are going to write 9+ "r u kidding this is the best game evar" reviews. Even if you weed out the clearly silly user reviews, the intelligently written ones still tend to award higher-than-critical scores. Again, though, I get the feeling that I may have simply misunderstood what you were trying to say.

I'd also point out that metacritic might not be the best place for user reviews. The Wii Sports average is based on a mere 70 votes. I could bring this down a whole tenth of a point by voting a single zero score, assuming it averages. Gamespot's 6000 votes award it an 8.5, as do gamerankings' 300, and this website gives it an 8.1 with 90 votes.

To go off on a tangent, I think that reviewer bias concerning these games is subject to two competing interests. On the one hand, I think that most reviewers know full well that their tastes are out of line with the mass market and that they'd be quite capable of upping scores to compensate. I get the feeling that this is what happens with a lot of sports games, actually - the people who go into game reviewing are going to tend not to like them terribly much, but they recognize this and so score them as sports games. The problem for these nontraditional games is that 'nontraditional' isn't really accepted as a category yet. People know that if a game called "NBA Hoops" gets a 9.5, it's just a really good basketball game, but is still a basketball game. However, a great many people will buy just about anything else that gets a 9+ score. And this generally works - for the vast majority of gamers, anything with a 9+ score is worth buying. People who generally dislike RPGs probably loved FFVII, people who generally dislike FPSs probably enjoyed Halo, etc. A website would anger a huge number of its readers if it were to score a game like Wii Sports at a 9.0. People don't yet understand that nontraditional games, like sports games, are an entirely different product than traditional games.

Not the best written paragraph, but I think I made a point somewhere in there.