Zod95 said: It's impossible to gather consensus even if you group people by game genre's tastes. For example, my favourite racing games (from 1st best to 6th best) are TrackMania United, Midnight Club 2, Crashday, Project Gotham Racing 4, Vanishing Point, MotorStorm Pacific Rift and TOCA Race Driver 3. No Gran Turismo, no Forza, no Need For Speed, no Burnout, no Mario Kart. No game had more than 90 in Metacritic and no one sold more than 2 million units. Who in the world shares this same taste? I guess no one...and very very few lists would be even close to mine. Maybe, and only maybe, if we had every quality game list racing fans we could aggregate the values and get at the end a list of the highest quality racing games. But we don't. As for my final goal, it's not to tell what are the best games (I'm not that arrogant) but just to give clues about where they might be and, above all, which might be the most commited devs to this industry that I love. I don't feel comfortable when I see a poorly commited company like Nintendo to be so praised by people that comment on forums (who should be the most informed ones). Like I said earlier, I find Nintendo to be quite competent...it's their attitude that I hate. My desire regarding Nintendo is that they either change their attitude towards gamers or that they fail in the videogaming business (to give more space to who is really commited). This is not a matter of tastes, this is a matter of respecting the industry and putting the gamer first. And don't come up with the argument that all companies are here to make money because, although that's true, I see a lot of different between Zumba Fitness makers and Valve. Money isn't everything and only some devs have the heart to see that and the artistic value and willingness to invest to demonstrate it. Again, I'm not talking about tastes. Neither Majesco nor Valve have games in my personal top quality list. But I'm not blind. I can see different attitude, different behaviour and different achievements between those companies. Regarding sales being a criteria to measure quality, that fails miserably. You have already listed 4 reasons why that wouldn't work, but there are more. I will not waste my time listing them. The bottom line is that sales can only tell you about the gamers' expectations, once they occur before the gamer experiencing the product. By the way, this made me laugh: "Going by the sales of games with similar cost that had good marketing, Nintendo games have high quality".

I never said there was, is, will be, or could be 100% consensus: in fact, I specifically denied it. But I do believe you would find some strong currents of opinion as to what the top 10 were (i.e., there might be 50 games that are much more commonly in people's top 10s). Your anecdote is pointless.

You claim not to be trying to identify the best games, but your formulas are explicitly about judging the quality of games based on some arbitrarily chosen quantifiable values. In trying to avoid the fuzziness of opinion and go with the concreteness of objective fact, you are ironically creating a system that is even worse and muddier and more confused for consistently identifying what games have good quality compared to the murkiness of people's competing opinions about "good level design" et cetera.

The reason for your quest, as you explicitly state here, is your contempt for Nintendo and the incredible snow job they are pulling on all the other games that think their games are great. You claim you aren't arrogant, but you simultaneously claim that your opinion (that Nintendo games are bad) is right while vastly more people who disagree with you are wrong because they are foolishly being blinded by Nintendo's ... mind control, cult of personality, I don't even know. How is this not arrogance?

My four reasons aren't reasons why looking at sales doesn't work, they are reasons why when you look at sales you have to assign weight to the numbers you see to make sense of them in context if you want to use them to decide what games are better than others. It's like if I said the Wii U sold 100k in a week. If it happened in a random week in July with no big release, that would be great! If it happened a week before Christmas, not so impressive. I don't know if you're not understanding what I said, or simply unable to comprehend the idea of a system that needs to be corrected for bias before fair results can be obtained instead of just looking at raw numbers being spat out.

I can easily rebut your "bottom line" on this by pointing out that lots of Nintendo games sell for YEARS AND YEARS. Do you think word of mouth doesn't exist? In a game that gets 50% of its sales in the first month then a person can easily buy a game with false expectations about the content, but if Mario Kart DS releases in 2005 I'd certainly hope most of the buyers had a very good idea what they were getting by 2008. I'm pretty sure they did. And if they didn't, why didn't they sell them all to used game stores, and why didn't all those used games end up cheap enough to where fewer people would buy them new? Wouldn't Mario games be a dollar apiece like old sports games if you were right?

It's nice that you're laughing, but I can't tell why. What about that statement is incorrect? Don't Nintendo games sell well considered to other similarly priced games? Or are you simply laughing at the very concept of a high quality Nintendo game? Laughing at a world that you can't understand, where the "educated forum posters"* like Nintendo games, but you don't, and they, therefore, must be deluded? You say that you can recognize quality in other publishers whose games you aren't a fan of, so therefore you aren't wrong about Nintendo. I'm telling you: you are wrong.

*Not a literal quote, but (I feel) an accurate one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVwI5399usg

Final-Fan said: I never said there was, is, will be, or could be 100% consensus: in fact, I specifically denied it. But I do believe you would find some strong currents of opinion as to what the top 10 were (i.e., there might be 50 games that are much more commonly in people's top 10s). Your anecdote is pointless. You claim not to be trying to identify the best games, but your formulas are explicitly about judging the quality of games based on some arbitrarily chosen quantifiable values. In trying to avoid the fuzziness of opinion and go with the concreteness of objective fact, you are ironically creating a system that is even worse and muddier and more confused for consistently identifying what games have good quality compared to the murkiness of people's competing opinions about "good level design" et cetera. The reason for your quest, as you explicitly state here, is your contempt for Nintendo and the incredible snow job they are pulling on all the other games that think their games are great. You claim you aren't arrogant, but you simultaneously claim that your opinion (that Nintendo games are bad) is right while vastly more people who disagree with you are wrong because they are foolishly being blinded by Nintendo's ... mind control, cult of personality, I don't even know. How is this not arrogance? My four reasons aren't reasons why looking at sales doesn't work, they are reasons why when you look at sales you have to assign weight to the numbers you see to make sense of them in context if you want to use them to decide what games are better than others. It's like if I said the Wii U sold 100k in a week. If it happened in a random week in July with no big release, that would be great! If it happened a week before Christmas, not so impressive. I don't know if you're not understanding what I said, or simply unable to comprehend the idea of a system that needs to be corrected for bias before fair results can be obtained instead of just looking at raw numbers being spat out. I can easily rebut your "bottom line" on this by pointing out that lots of Nintendo games sell for YEARS AND YEARS. Do you think word of mouth doesn't exist? In a game that gets 50% of its sales in the first month then a person can easily buy a game with false expectations about the content, but if Mario Kart DS releases in 2005 I'd certainly hope most of the buyers had a very good idea what they were getting by 2008. I'm pretty sure they did. And if they didn't, why didn't they sell them all to used game stores, and why didn't all those used games end up cheap enough to where fewer people would buy them new? Wouldn't Mario games be a dollar apiece like old sports games if you were right? It's nice that you're laughing, but I can't tell why. What about that statement is incorrect? Don't Nintendo games sell well considered to other similarly priced games? Or are you simply laughing at the very concept of a high quality Nintendo game? Laughing at a world that you can't understand, where the "educated forum posters"* like Nintendo games, but you don't, and they, therefore, must be deluded? You say that you can recognize quality in other publishers whose games you aren't a fan of, so therefore you aren't wrong about Nintendo. I'm telling you: you are wrong. *Not a literal quote, but (I feel) an accurate one.

Not 100%, not 80%, not 50%...not even 10% consensus. Maybe 1%. That's no consensus. You claim "there might be 50 games that are much more commonly in people's top 10s". Much more commonly than what?...than the games that come next to those 50? In that case, we could say the same thing about the first 10, the first 20, the first 100, the first 200 games too. That's perfectly normal. Some games will be more chosen than others. The question is: do you know what are those games? If you do, if you have the compreensive statistics, I can forget about consensus and just do the maths. The average of all the (very) different opinions will show us where the quality is. If you don't (and that's for sure because nobody has such numbers), I can tell you that with 1% consensus no sample (of gamers who love racing games) smaller than thousands can be statistically representative about the quality of hundreds of racing games. You can challenge that the consensus is not at 1% but then I challenge you to present a solid number about it. This quality assessment through subjectivity is your call. If you can't come up with solid proof, this way you suggested to assess quality is just a fail...and you can't, so I can tell you now: it's a fail.

Regarding my objective criteria, son, for the last time: it's not about quality, it's not about good or bad, it's about commitment of the devs. In addition to my objective criteria about intellectual achievements I also talked about investment numbers, targetted audiences and man-hours work. I'm not being arrogant, I'm being objective. If under objective analysis Nintendo gets poor performance, that's not my fault. That's Nintendo's fault. In terms of quality, Nintendo can be the best, or Ubisoft, or Majesco. I don't know, I don't have the numbers (nobody has). I just talk about what I do have numbers or hard evidence. I talk about things that no fanboy, no crazy person, no biased gamer whatsoever could come here and say "Majesco is the best regarding your criteria" without being instantly caught in his/her lie. Unlike you, I don't have the pretension to assess quality. My ambition is to assess objective matters that might give us an idea about where the quality is. It's as if different companies were trying to find oil wells, you are trying to tell who will find them, I'm just telling who is digging deeper.

As for your attempt to judge quality by sales, that system doesn't need corrections. It's simply not viable. It's you that doesn't understand the whole extent of it. Some dev can produce a great game and that game may not sell. This is perfectly possible and there are too many reasons for this to happen. What will you do about it? Will you see its metascore? What about games that sell well with terrible metascores? Doesn't that prove that critic scores can fail too? If so, isn't possible to exist high quality games with both sales and critic scores at low levels? What will you do? Introduce a 3rd, 4th, 5th criteria? Or will you tell those games are not significant? Then I ask you: how do you know the significance of each case? We don't have any idea about the correlations between quality and any other number (sales, critic scores, user scores which are contaminated by hating, etc.), so we don't have any idea about the significance of any case. I just humbly see quality as an independent factor until someone proves the opposite.

And the "word-of-mouth" factor just supports even more my bottom line. Like the very words suggest, it's about "words" rather than experiences and it's about "mouths" rather than eyes and fingers. So, it's about expectations rather than true experiences. As for the used games, many people aren't even aware of that process (mostly casual gamers) and some others like me create collections and thus keep every game no matter if it was a great choice or a flop (it's part of the collection) while others prefer to rotate and thus sell all the games of a console (no matter if they are good or bad) once they buy a new one. All of this contaminates your "used games" analysis. Moreover, Nintendo always had as long-term strategy to keep the product value perception along the time. That's why we usually don't see price drops of their consoles, that's why in the 6th generation we saw GBA games at the 50 euros standard while getting PS2 games (2 or 3 generations ahead) for the same price (sometimes even less), that's why in the 7th and 8th generation we see DS/3DS games usually more expensive than PSP/Vita games (which are 1 or 2 generations ahead), virtual console games on Wii more expensive than PS1 classics on PS3, etc. Putting Mario games at 1 dollar would spoil all of this huge speculative strategy.

Regarding that statement of yours that I laugh about, were you talking about cost or price? Those are very different things and change completely the meaning of the sentence. If it was cost (like I thought it was), I laugh because no one tells Nintendo not to heavily spend on the development of games. Quality is quality, no matter the cost. Talking about quality / cost ratios makes no sense at all.

Zod95 said: ^ It's right up there, I'll save some space

No, I don't have data on what games are in people's top 10, or top 100, aside from sales. But both of us have ideas about what is true here that affect how we see the rest of it. I'm not "assessing quality" by what I've said in this part, so your objection is "a fail". (should be "a failure")

On judging quality by sales, I didn't say that the system I proposed was perfect. Games will slip through the cracks: games that most people would agree are "good" will sell poorly even after making all reasonable adjustments for the factors I mentioned, and games that most people would agree are "bad" might sell well after adjustments. But I believe those would be exceptions, not common. When Nintendo has made hundreds, maybe thousands of games over decades, I think we can figure out a trend without being deceived by anomalies if we have a system that is imperfectly consistent.

You can't see your own bias. Your investment numbers are bullshit, your targeted audiences are made up (kindergarten), and your man-hours worked evidence is nonexistent. Your "objective criteria about intellectual achievements" are worthless. For your oil well analogy, I'm saying Nintendo HAS FOUND THEM IN THE PAST (as in all the way up to current day).

I'm sorry that I keep forgetting that you are not trying to judge who makes "good" games but who is committed to making "good" games. Aside from pointing to things like your "kindergarten" comments, and aside from my own faults, I can only suggest that I forget because of the LUDICROUSNESS of the idea that Nintendo isn't among "the most committed devs to this industry that [you] love." Nintendo has been making video games for longer than 99% of the companies out there. They are the oldest hardware maker in the biz and they have been behind every controller innovation that took hold. The gaming public loves their games, and games are the lifeblood of their company in a way that simply isn't true at all of Sony and Microsoft. How could they NOT be committed to the industry? Also, separately from their "commitment to the industry", they've been making games that are widely considered to be great games (not by you, but by most people) for decades, how can they then be not committed to "making good games"?

Like the very words suggest, it's about "words" rather than experiences and it's about "mouths" rather than eyes and fingers. So, it's about expectations rather than true experiences. This is willfull ignorance. People know each other. They know each other's preferences. If my friend comes up to me and says "hey this is a really good game, I like it because blah blah blah" I'm going to have a pretty fair idea of whether I would also like it based on what I know about him. And if it's a game like Mario Kart that I can PLAY WITH HIM on his copy, then if I buy my own copy I'm going to know damn well what I'm getting! And if he bought Mario Kart and found out it was a stupid kindergarten game, he would say "oh jeez Final-Fan, Nintendo really dropped the ball on this one" and I wouldn't buy it. The longer a game has been out the more likely it is that a person in the market will have an accurate idea of the game. Nintendo games sell forever. Do the math.

Your idea that Nintendo inflates the price of their stuff and people say "hey that costs a lot so it must be good, I'll go buy it!" is a pitiful explanation of the combination of Nintendo's sales figures and price tags. No company in the world can fool people for that long. You must think Nintendo is a high quality magician if not a high quality game maker because your hypothesis is in defiance of all economic theory.

As for your price/cost question, if you look at the context it is perfectly clear that I was talking about cost to the customer, i.e. price. Nintendo games actually often continue to sell well at full price at times when the Sony/MS games would have long since been given price cuts! Remember, higher cost means people have to like it more in order to buy it than if it had a lower cost. I'm sorry you misunderstood me, but I clearly defined my terms: 2—Cost. People will pay more for a thing they like more; if a thing costs less, more people will buy it even if they like it less. So cheap games can sell more than more expensive games that are more well-liked. You should have known that by "cost" I meant what you call "price", since I defined the term back in "2" and ALSO gave context that I was talking about cost to the consumer of the individual games instead of the overall cost to the company of developing the game.

My god, the text! I'm blind.

Stefan.De.Machtige said: My god, the text! I'm blind.

I shortened it some—there's no point in quoting the whole wall of text when the very previous post is that same wall—but other than that ... suck it up.

You all do know that the Wii U is already selling more a week then the PS4 is, right?

Here's the proof that the Wii U is selling more then other new Consoles:
http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=173373

Kaizar said: You all do know that the Wii U is already selling more a week then the PS4 is, right? Here's the proof that the Wii U is selling more then other new Consoles: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=173373

ps4 is us only so that isnt really a proof

PS4 and Xbox One overtake WiiU in the UK.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/ps4-has-sold-over-250k-ps4s-in-the-uk/0125169

Seece said: PS4 and Xbox One overtake WiiU in the UK. http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/ps4-has-sold-over-250k-ps4s-in-the-uk/0125169

You forgot to add that Knack outsold Super Mario 3D World :/.