But that was the whole point of my post, Fum:

People will choose to see things more clearly that support their own prejudices. 

You can say the same thing two different ways and only believe one, but both can be true.

The head start will "always" be a mitigating factor for PS3 fanboys, and will "always" be an important advantage to take into account for 360 fanboys.  That's just the way that prejudice filters data.

Alic

The problem with the way you're organizing the data is that each grouping isn't equal. If your point was to split the listing into groups of every 5th percentile instead of every 10th, that I can get on board with. Sliding the scale to fit different scenarios isn't a way to measure anything. Your top and bottom groups would only consist of of 5% each and the rest would account for 10%. I've kept it even in every category and have organized it in the exact same way everyone else does around here. 5th percentile works too. But not a sliding scale of different measurements. In your world, we can simply slide the scale to a hundred different combinations and they are all of equal stature. Why not just make it look like this?

96-100%
93-95%
84-94%
57-83%
54-57%
31-53%
1-30%

This has as much chance of working as anything else correct? I used 10% because people understand it. They understand 5%. I don't think anyone other than yourself sees the point in making cutoffs wherever we feel like it to get a hundred different results.

That's fine. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. This is meant in a much more general sense.

It is worth noting though that it required two different platforms in tandem to cancel out the 360 for you.

Hey Onyx, thanks for responding. I should have made it clearer what I was objecting to in the thread. In your original post, you say, "I see a lot of misconception, especially from fans of a certain other console and from people saying PS3/PC is the way to go. So I took it up to see if this were true. Here are the findings, no spin required."

In every category of your original post, you find that the 360 has more exclusives. As an owner of both systems, that didn't mesh with my personal experience this year, which was that they were about even (only got the PS3 a few months ago) so I looked up the actual review scores for the games you listed.

Well to be fair, you were thinking of it in terms of 2008, which is a part of this piece I hadn't gotten to yet, which is showing a trend in year after year. Thankfully miboukami did the work, so we actually can see both console makers have been improving their number of exclusives year in and year out.

What I found was that a shift in the criteria shows the PS3 equalling or outperforming the 360, at least in the upper reaches of the metacritic spectrum (I didn't take the time to do the lower rated games because I'm pretty sure the 360 would come out ahead).

85% is a perfectly reasonable cutoff for categorizing game reviews; 95% is a bit ridiculous given the lack of games in that category -- chalk that one up to my LBP fanboyism (which I freely admit!) I'm not aware of any statistical methodology that requires all percentages to be sorted in tens, or even one that requires the increments always be even, as long as they aren't too ridiculous and obviously biased. In fact, I've seen 85+ used a lot when companies brag about their ratings.

I agree that 85% is a reasonable cutoff. All I'm saying is that if we're going to cut like that, then let's just cut every category into fives and then each category is equal to the next.

If Microsoft came out with an add saying "360 has more exclusive games rated 80+" and Sony came out with a press release after Killzone 2 (assuming it does well) saying "PS3 has caught up on exclusive games rated 85+" I don't think anyone would persuasively argue that one of the companies' was screwing up the data or doing something people don't understand.

Getting past the fact that everyone calls bullshit on both parties' PR constantly, no one would question it. However I'm seperating into categories, and they are merely stating a single number, which is a different measurement in itself. My point wasn't to show who had better exclusives. It was to show that 360 has a comparable amount of exclusives in every general cutoff point so it couldn't be said that a giant list of 62 exclusives were all crap and shovelware.

If on the other hand one of them tried to use your crazy but awesome list of percentages above, it would be pretty hilarious. . . and a little scary.

Anyway, I objected because -- I thought -- you presented your post as factual evidence that the 360 categorically outperforms the PS3 in number of exclusives when sorted by rating, both in high rated games and low rated games. I pointed out that, depending on where you draw the line, it's actually pretty much the same number of highly rated exclusives. If I sounded like I was making an impassioned argument for the PS3 being "better", I really wasn't trying to -- I was just poking a hole in your system, arguing with what I thought was your argument, and pointing out to the legion that jumped on the bandwagon, that not everyone who disagrees with them is the victim of a "misconception."

Even if I draw the line where you suggested and the PS3 comes out with exactly the same amount of highly rated games, my conclusion doesn't change. It still shows that 360 is not merely a bunch of good shared PC titles and barely any real exclusives. The exclusive library can stand on it's own in a general sense. It has variety, high scoring games, and is comparable to it's nearest competition. That's all I needed to debunk the myth.

I didn't think that your post was intentionally misleading at all, and the only thing that annoyed me about it was that it served as firepower for a bunch of fanboys to try to expand their territory, for lack of a better metaphor. Plenty of exclusives that aren't on PC, sure. Dominating the PS3? I definitely wouldn't tell that to any friend of mine who was trying to decide between the two. (Though I'd probably recommend the 360, because of the price, unless I thought they'd like LBP).

Unfortunately, there was no way to avoid the fanboy reactions from both sides. It was inevitable. I do figure the Metacritic addition helped keep them more at ease rather than me not including them though. I tried my best to back everyone into a corner so they couldn't brush this away as bullshit, so I left my opinions at home and came equipped with data that most of this site agrees is fairly equal across both platforms. I'm happy with how it's turned out so far because I've had numerous people in here that were duped into believing in the myth say that they were shocked to see the 360 stand on it's own against the PS3 in exclusives. Does it take every conceievable factor into account? No. Does it prove my original point though? Abolutely 100% yes. The benefit is that the next time someone tries to spew that tired old line, someone can link them to this thread and that person can eat their crow.

It's Onyxmeth0314 on PSN by the way. I don't have LBP yet, but maybe we'll both have something we can rock out to online.

Alic

Same goes for me, though I got some people apparently mad or something by stating the same thing, I really can't see a reason investing in a 360 if you have a PS3 and a gaming PC since you get the same game with typically more options, free online, and better graphics plus the options to use a USB controller and hook your PC up to a TV so no real reason to invest if you ask me.  You have some exclusives but as OkeyD said there are the ones here and there that you want to play but then there's the better games in the same genre that are multiplatform.