Many websites are reporting this week that Wii has the lowest percentage of good games.  Here are the numbers:

  (using metacritic to calculate the scores, over 60% is considered "good", less than 60% is considered "bad") 

 Wii:  59.47%

 360: 74.20% 

 PS3: 81.16%  

I decided to see if anything similar happened last generation.  To my surprise, it did.  The higher the sales, the worse the overall % of games becomes.

PS2 1154 / 1547 (74.59%)

xbox: 660 / 856 (77.10%)

Gamecube: 402 / 502 (80.07%)

dreamcast: 118/143 (82.51%)



Let’s go another gen back. From best selling to worst selling.



ps1 190 / 252 (75.39%)

n64 73/89 (82.02%)

 

My guess as to why this happens is as good as yours, but it's interesting.

 I also believe this data proves that the percentage of trash games is irrelevant to informed consumers since they never experience any.  It would be hard to argue the Gamecube was superior to PS2 based on percentages.

YOu forgot to put the saturn in the 5th gen one.

Great post.

There are two reasons for this IMO:

- Shovelware is only profitable with a big userbase.
- Reviewers don't have the same taste as the majority of buyers of successful consoles.

As for the Wii, this score will improve with time since good games take long to develop. Developers and publishers were not expecting the Wii to be so successful, therefore most of their first few games for the console were rushed titles.

I was only using metacritic, sometime this week I'll switch to gamerankings to cover the rest of the 5th gen, and perhaps 4th gen & 3rd gen as well.

The Wii's situation is entirley different from that of previous generations.

1) It's aiming for a new market who don't neccaserily care about review scores.

2) Developing cost's of PS3/360 far exceed that of the Wii ( making shovelware for the PS3 & 360 will make you bankrupt basicaly.)

All leading platforms are going to get the most shovelware , it's logical that a developer would make shovelware for the leading platorm.

However at the end of this gen you'll find that the Wii has levels of shovelware which far exceed the leading consoles of previous generations ( thanks to the two factors stated above).

 Ok other than that the comparison is good.

On another note, I'd like to say that the only people who really care about those statistics are people who want to put the Wii down.

As a Wii owner, I don't care how much shovelware there is. I simply don't buy it, and life goes happily on.

PS: This is not a criticism of the thread, as I said above it's interesting to see how this gen compares to the previous ones.

Another way to look at the numbers is to look at the total number of games.

Using Metacritic we get the following.
PS3 - 154 games = 80 % = 123 good games.
Wii - 190 games = 60 % = 114 good games.

OMG, the Wii is dead. The fad is over because PS3 has 9 more "good" games over the Wii out of 344 combined games.


Hardly worth the bandwidth expelled to generate that slanted report in the first place.

Well, it's the same thing that happens with music. I'm not surprised.