If it means anything, there's this site I like called Backloggd, where people go and give their own ratings and reviews to games. On there, 40 thousand people have given their ratings on Clair Obscur, and the average rating is 4.65/5, which is the highest of any game ever (not including DLCs or "GotY editions").

It's still a tiny group, a fraction of the people who even played the game to begin with, but it's a much bigger sample size and yeah, the praise is high. I think it's clear that Clair Obscur's massive success is a result of very positive word-of-mouth, though I'm not sure how big a part the actual critics play in that.

Either way, I don't expect Prime 4 to have bad sales because of the reviews, though I do expect it to sell at most as much as Dread sold. And I know we expect better from Metroid, but saying 81 is a "bad" score is pretty ridiculous... and it doesn't ever matter. Seeing people deciding to pass on it because of the metacritic is silly, just play the game and form your own opinion. My favorite game of all time has an 80 on metacritic.

Oh my point was never that Clair Obscur isn't widely beloved, it clearly is, just that a Metacritic score doesn't determine that as the people giving their views there aren't even 0.01% of the people who played it.

But yeah I largely agree, the notion that a 81/100 on Meta is going to damage sales to a significant extent is silly, and I also expect similar sales to Dread.

This doesn't make the score of audiences and critics diverge, it only means few people played/watched the movies/games in question. Niche movies have very high scores on sites like imdb or letterboxd, or even on research institutes like cinemascore that measures what people who went to theaters felt about the movies they watched

And a game can sell millions and still have pretty bad reception from the millions of players who played the game. Some things sells a lot even if the consensus is that said thing is mediocre or even outright bad, sometimes only because people are curious about the concept, or because is what the trend of the moment and you suffering FOMO. Palworld comes to mind

It does actually, critics and consumers disagree frequently, because critics are typically a certain kind of person that tend to have certain preferences and biases while the total audience is a much more heterogenous group with more diverse preferences.

There is no such thing as objective quality because playing a game is an inherently subjective experience shaped by individual perception.

They don't disagree all that much. At least is not what the data shows when comparing critics scores like Metacritic and public scores like imdb. There's research about actually (and I studied that myself before)

I must confess I've never studied gaming score correlation, I can take a look and compare Meta/Open with backloggd eventually, but I don't think it would be representative yet since backloggd is still growing  

Sales/Box office and reviews are different things of course. As stated is very much common to consume things you actually thing are bad, I have watch so many bad movies only to have some fun going out with family or friends, movies that I would have still scored poorly even after investing my money and time on it 

It's more that every person is different and has their own preferences/biases/etc, so if you take a group such as critics that all have the same profession and mostly similar backgrounds as gaming journalists/enthusiasts, you won't necessarily get the same consensus as the broader audience. Often you will, as certain traits and tropes are widely popular/unpopular, but critics aren't some mighty arbiter of universal truth, they're still just people.

Didn't post here before, so it's a bit late now to make a prediction, but think I would have said MP4 before Kirby came out and still would say it now. Kirby has done very bad in the UK at least, most likely most of Europe, and I've expected Prime 4 to be able to hit 5m sales LT. The low 80's meta doesn't really change that for me.

Even if we only count the Switch 2 version of MP4 I'd still expect it to beat Kirby. Kirby looks like a fun time to me, but I don't think $70 was the right price point for it. I'll get it when/if it's cheaper.