Midyear Report: The Best Games of 2010 So Far

Now that we are at the midway point of 2010, what do we know? For starters, you haven’t been buying as many games as you used to; through May, game sales are down 6% in 2010 vs. the first five months of 2009, according to NPD Group.

But the decline in sales doesn’t mean that there has been a corresponding drop in game quality in 2010. On the contrary, for every platform we track, the average game Metascore has been higher in 2010 than during the first six months of 2009 — meaning the games have been earning somewhat better reviews this year.

So far in 2010, seven individual titles (some on multiple platforms) have achieved stellar Metascores of 90 or higher, a number comparable to the first half of 2009. Three separate titles — the ones listed in the box at the right — all scored higher than 2009’s best-reviewed first-half release, Street Fighter IV (PS3: 94). And, at the other end of the quality spectrum, 25 separate titles received terrible reviews (49 or lower) in the first half of 2009; that number is down to 16 this year.

That could be a very good sign for 2010, as many of the year’s best releases typically don’t surface until autumn. Of course, the news wasn’t equally good for every platform over the past six months, as our comparison chart indicates below.

* Includes games released in the U.S. between January 1, 2010 and June 30, 2010 with at least seven reviews.

The # Great indicates the number of games released during the year with a Metascore of 90 or higher. The % Good reflects the percentage of games receiving a Metascore of 75 or higher (indicating positive reviews). % Mixed shows the percentage receiving a Metascore of 50-74 (indicating mixed or middling reviews), while % Bad includes games receiving a Metascore of 49 or lower (indicating negative reviews).

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not personally a fan of metacritic but many on here are,

thoughts?

Bwuhh? DS on top? That's just weird.

They aren't the best games, they are the most critically acclaimed for what thats worth...

If you read the whole article they use VGChartz as their source for sales data! Yay us!

It has a lot less games released than the consoles, so that would explain its higher percentage of good games

I'll say the same as last year.

Unless you are forced to buy and play every single game on a platform, percentages as in this case don't matter at all.

As a gamer it's only important to know the number of great, good and also but not so much mixed rated games.

Median Metascore is just as flawed in this case.

Are you sure about that?

I thought it's just that ppl don't hype about DS games. (Doesn't mean there aren't games on it...)

It's kind of lame how they determine an exclusive.

They actually make sure it's exclusive to that console. Like if it's on PS3, it's ONLY on PS3, not PC, just PS3. How's that lame?

OT: DS had no bad games? O_O

And the quality seems similar all around.

Well for example, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger Portable is supposedly not exclusive to the PSP while Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake is.

MLB 10: The Show is not the same on PSP and PS3, yet it's not considered an exclusive.