Samus Aran said:
I was talking about people who played all or most of the games I mentioned. I've seen polls on plenty of different forums and never once did Rayman Legends get many votes for best 2D platformer this generation. As for CoD, it's on a much bigger userbase and has a much bigger marketing budget. Besides, sales can only be compared when the games in question are of a similar genre, are on the same console(s) and have a similar marketting budget. The point is that critics aren't representative for the normal gaming audience. Critics might love Bayonetta 2, but I can assure you most people aren't into a game like that. Even if you gave it a huge marketting budget it wouldn't sell well. |
Which is completely irrelevant to the validity of a metascore. Games are (at least for the most part) reviewed with their target audience in mind. Does Bayonetta 2 scoring higher than Yoshi mean it's inherently better? No, but it does mean that at least on a limited generalized scale, it is better to its target audience. That certainly seems to have been the case with those two, at from what I've seen on VGC.
Stuff like MC and GR provide targeted generalizations. No more, no less. If 100 critics say [x] is great, and [x] is the type of game i like, then it's pretty likely i'll also think it's great. Not always, there will always be variance with such things (especially when dealing with relatively small sample sizes), but frequently enough for me to value it as a view point i can't, as an individual, properly see through.
I think we'd see a lot less bickering about stuff like metacritic (and a lot less silly comparisons) if people took a moment to consider what the data actually represents, and that it doesn't exist on a singular field.
Anyway, i'm going to call it quits here. I think this is the 4th or 5th time I've had this discussion on VGC, so needless to say i'm somewhat bored of it. You'd think i'd have learnt not to bother by now 
