For countless centuries, gamers have asked the question of "What Impact do reviews have on the sales of games?" Some say that positive reviews are the nectar that games need to thrive, while others say that games sell based on brand name and word of mouth. So in order to settle this debate for once and for all, I decided to try and determine the exact numerical relationship between game review scores and a game's sales.

To start, I decided to work with a platform that has both been closely followed by the online gaming community, thus guaranteeing hundreds of games with Metascores and sales numbers on VGChartz, and yet is mostly a "finished" platform, with few notable releases in recent years: the PSP. I was also considering the Wii, but figured that the bundling of games on the Wii made the PSP a better choice.

The Plan

• First, open up a VGChartz page showing the Top 1000 best-selling PSP games. This includes 5/6 of retail PSP titles to sell at least 10,000 copies, and also eliminates games that have probably not been well tracked.
• Next, open up Metacritic's list of every PSP game to ever be reviewed in the West. In order to have a Metascore, four reputable Western reviewers need to have given it a review.
• Games with Metascores of under 51 are excluded, mostly due to logistical and software error reasons.
• In total, this gives us exactly 460 games. These 460 games not only have tracked sales and reviews, but also represent over 200 million copies of games sold. This is about 70% of all PSP software sales, which is not bad considering how many games were released only in Japan (particularly Monster Hunter 3 Portable, which is about 2% by itself) and thus never got Metascores.
• Games are then categorized by Metascore, both each individual point and in groups of 5 or more points. Each category then gets its average sales per game calculated.

The Results:

I'm going to show the graphs first, then the tables,

Observations:

The results of this study are interesting to say the least.

• First of all, the best-reviewed games DID sell the best. These included games like Grand Theft Auto, God of War, and Metal Gear Solid. Games with a Metascore of 86 or more sold over twice as much on average as games rated only 81 to 85.
• HOWEVER, after reaching the mid-70's, average game sales did not continue to decline at the same constant rate as previously. Games rated 71 to 75 on Metacritic sold about 0.17 million MORE than their 76 to 80 counterparts. This can be explained by games like Gran Turismo, Monster Hunter Freedom 2, LEGO titles, and various sports games, which scored in the lower 70's range.
• You'd expect this to be the anamoly, but the 61 to 70 range didn't sell that much worse than the 76 to 80 range. Games in the 61 to 70 range included licensed games, sports and racing games, Call of Duty, Final Fantasy, and console ports.
• Sales below 60 continued to fall at a surprisingly slow rate compared to the 76+ games' rate.51 to 55 games only sold about 40% less than games rated 10 points higher.
• Incidentally, these are larger trends. It is VERY difficult to determine what the next point of data will be like, simply because any next game could have been a big seller despite reviews.

Conclusions:

First of all, it appears that there IS a positive correlation between the review scores of games and their sales, at least on the PSP. However, said relationship loses most of its impact once you stop working with the upper tiers of games. In other words, getting a 77 on your game instead of 87 is MUCH worse than getting a 67 instead of a 77.

What this means is that BOTH sides of the argument are right. Although high-scoring reviews certainly seem to help a game, they are NOT necessary for them to sell decently.

So yeah. I'll probably add more stuff to the OP later, but this took me much of the night to do and I'm tired.

I'm pretty sure that correlation exists on every console. The best selling games will usually be the ones with the best reviews, because if they were not good games or oritically accepted games, they wouldn't have sold to begin with. And when we talk about games sold decently but with mixed reviews at best, we normally find games that appeal to an audience that doesn't really care about reviews (games based on movies, cartoons, puzzle games, simulation games, shovelware...)

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Interesting. Great work on this research!

You're likely right. The role of marketing is likely the cause of the results.

As for this being a waste of time, I would disagree (though thank you for being so polite about it). To my knowledge, the topic of the relation between reviews and sales has not had a proper statistical analysis despite being often discussed. At very least, this gives me a resource to look back at and consider the future reviews/sales of games with.

In particular, this has taught me that although reviews do have some relation with sales, they are largely limited to higher scoring games. That confirmation alone made this worth the time for me.

Thank you.