While we are discussiing sales and quality, we should also mention value.  What a person is willing to pay for what is being offered.  The vast majority seem to value "good enough" for a low price.  Balanceis the key word in this case.

Games with high sales have more of the qualities which appeal to a lot of people. Games which have a lot of qualities which appeal to a lot of people are much higher quality than those which don't. A game which doesn't appeal to you doesn't have a lot of qualities which appeal to you but may have a lot of qualities which appeal to other people. So in a personal sense a game can have few good qualities whilst overall have a lot of qualities which appeal to a lot of other people.

In short, just because it appeals or doesn't appeal to the one person doesn't mean that persons quality evaluation is relevant to anyone else. So a single person is an even worse judge of quality than sales. Also like anything you need to qualify qualities, as in 'I respect this person, or I think hes a bit of a fanboy idiot' vs 'did this sell because it was good or because a few million people got duped on launch week'?

In general if I was forced to only own the top 10 sales for the Wii I would own, excluding bundles and repeats, full price software:

• Mario Kart
• Wii Sports resort
• Wii Fit
• New Super Mario Brothers
• SSBB
• SMG
• Mario and Sonic at the olympic games
• Mario Party 8
• SMG 2
• Legend Of Zelda

If I was to own the top 10 Wii rated games I would own, same rules apply:

• Super Mario Galaxy
• SMG 2
• Legend of Zelda
• SSBB
• Rock band 2/3
• Metroid Prime trilogy
• Resident Evil 4
• Okami
• Guitar Hero 5
• DJ Hero 2

I see a lot of repeats from one to the other and overall I can't really say that the list of top 10 sales vs top 10 'critically' reviewed is that much different from each other. I wouldn't say that the critically acclaimed software top 10 is any higher in quality than the top 10 by sales of full price unbundled software.

Funnily, I was going to do it for 360 but the top was all Gears, Halo and Call of Duty!

doesn't have anything to do with quality

Quantity never ever makes for quality. Take a look at the sales number for the Call of Duty games, and tell me if any of those games have really changed, other then guns and landscapes, since Call of Duty 4. While i still have my fun with Black Ops, I don't try to believe it's the greatest game out there at all. I like going on as a group with my close friends for some game time at night, but other then that meh.

Sorry for going off topic a little there. Just pointing out the obvious i guess.

To a certain extent, I think your argument also demonstrates that the similarities and differences between review scores and games may be based heavily on the limited demographic diversity of game reviewers ...

While there are many core gamers who own the Wii, a large portion of Wii owners (and people who are Wii users) are not traditional core gamers; and what they see as a quality videogame might be significantly different from what an 18 to 35 year old single male who loves Call of Duty sees as a quality videogame. Being that the XBox 360 has a more uniform userbase which more closely resembles game reviewers games that review well tend to be the same games that sell well; while the Wii's more diverse userbase means that more games that are not seen as quality titles by reviewers sell quite well.

...well this thread is the complete opposite of what I thought it was going to be.

We've seen it countless times before, quality does not equal sales! So you can't compare the two like that.

Sales does NOT equal quality. Now way in HELL.

Ditto.

Don't you mean divergent rather than diverse userbase for the Wii? I.E. the userbase diverges from the reviewers in that they often have different opinions on the same games whereas the Xbox 360 and PS3 userbase alligns with the reviewers. Arguably the pool of reviewers could effectively be said to be drawn mostly from the Xbox 360 and PS3 console users.

Quality in general is a messy concept because it doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. It even differs significantly if you're taking a meta view on quality in general or specifically pin pointing a single game to a single user in other cases. In most cases where I have seen quality arguments the whole argument fails on the grounds that the two or more people arguing are arguing upon different definitions of quality and thus can never agree or convince the other person which makes the whole thing pointless.

I think one of the important questions isn't sales vs quality, it is the relationship appeal and quality. That is really the question of this thread since by refining the concept of sales to appeal you can cut through a lot of qualifications required when using sales on their own. If art doesn't appeal can it still be called high quality and if art does appeal to a wide audience can it said to be of low quality? This is a question which has grappled the arts for a significantly long period of time. Both sides have strong arguments but I haven't really heard of anyone creating a theory or concept which unifies both positions satisfactorily.

Quality is completely subjective. For example, some people find games like Zack and Wiki, Madworld, and World of Goo to be high quality - I found them to be quite boring; people mentioned Wii Sports as being low quality, but I had way more fun playing Wii Sports than all three of those so-called high quality titles combined.

Of course, my favourite Wii game also happened to be one of the consoles least successful, and that was Rune Factory Frontier.

As for comparing games like Pokemon to fast food. That's a terrible analogy; the appeal of fast food is that it is fast. Fact: Team Ico games take the same amount of time to buy as a Pokemon game. The reason goes back to my first point, that quality is subjective; and way more people feel Pokemon is a better experience than Ico. Pokemon has one of the largest fanbases in the history of videogames.

Inception is a good example of a game that many people felt was great - but I found kind of stupid (Well maybe stupid is too strong of a word; silly?). Most of the people who found it "cool"said they had to watch it two or three times to really "get it"; so perhaps it only works on people who can't quite get it the first time? I got it on the first go - but found the idea of "going into a dream within a dream within a dream, and fighting off guys with machine guns who are created to force you out of the dream, and getting stuck in limbo if they kill you in the dream within a dream within a dream" reminded me of a Derrick Comedy skit called "Daughters". Oh, and and the segment of FF7 when Tifa went into Cloud's dreams to allow him to find out who he really was (not the SOLDIER, or a creation of Hojo, but the regular trooper who wanted to be SOLDIER).