You just listed how much every console's audience agree with the game reviewers. It is clear that the Wii needs reviewers who are closer to the console's audience.

And don't come saying: ''but the games are just bad!''. Why are people buying those games then? If a game truly sucks in every aspect, it won't ever sell much if it isn't hyped to death. Those games won't deserve the mouth-to-mouth advertising, so they won't have legs.

The worst thing you're doing here is that you're blaming the buyers of the games. The consumer is NEVER, I say NEVER to blame for something not selling accordingly. You might disagree with most people, that's fine, but in the end it's the masses that decide something's good. This can only be influenced by things like hype. And that's why a lot of HD games get the hype-treatment, because they aren't fine-tuned to the masses they need the extra boost.


@Esa-Petteri:

You are extremely afraid of the Wii. Moreover, you're afraid of general opinion. You can't stand seeing people find something superior that you find inferior. You are a most excellent example of Hardcore.
Although... HD consoles can hardly be considered hardcore, as they are essentially mass market, ''casual'' gaming pc's. Nothing wrong with that, but that's the reason they sell so well, and that's the reason why I have one. It's an easy, care-free way to play pc games.

And by the way, you're right about being scared about the Wii, because it's going to push your ass back to the pc or bakc to retro console gaming.

that is exactly why I cited the 3 wii music games...like the MK series, the core gameplay is not very varying besides the new tracks ( =D ), yet these seem to always get great scores for adding drums? the same 4 buttons pushed differently? , but MK which adds online play (an extreemly big leap for MK) and bikes to it's gameplay is seen as identical to it's previous itterations?

Was this not just as much of a leap (I believe it's a bigger one) than the music games?

I'm not complaining about MK's bad score, i'm stating that your approach is made flawed by this double standard there is which removes a 17M game and puts 3 less deserving 3M games in it's place...

You are amusing one. :) I do have a gaming pc and the reason I have 360 is because that is casual gaming for me. Not wii casual, which I have another word for but I'm afraid I will get banned if I say it out loud.

Wii is not going to "push me back to pc or retro consoles", how on earth it would do that?

And for being afraid of wii, are you really serious or just trying to flame? For your sake, I hope the latter.

Very good post. Indeed, a game's legs are a good indicator of game quality, as they mean that a game has good word of mouth (or at least doesn't have bad word mouth).

Interesting. you have to assume a certain level of consistency in reviews, etc. but I guess that's fair enough.

It doesn't surprise me with the HD consoles - apart from a few wobbles on each (Haze, Too Human, etc) for the most part any big hyped title that is good will sell well. I guess some would argue that such titles tend to be overly praised by critics, but it would be impossible to try and weight the analysis to account for this.  I guess it could be argued that the HD consoles would almost always skew towards well reviewing titles and that there is a case for seeing reviews, etc. skewed towards the HD console titles (more on that in a moment).

It's also possible that its better to have the Wii's position vs the HD twins - i.e. while high reviewing, big budget titles sell well lots of other stuff tanks on HD consoles while Wii sells lots of stuff well, quality or not, and tends to support better on-going sales vs a big spike for the next big thing.

It should also be noted that Wii titles may not be as consistently reviewed as HD titles - in particular many fun, well selling titles tend to get poor reviews that probably indicate a review system stance vs content mismatch.  So I wouldn't see the Wii as necessarily trailing for quality as much as the analysis suggests.

wow, nice post Maze...

actually a top 10 reviews' sales VS top 10 sales might be an interesting stat for reviewer's closeness to the audience. I think he used VS overall sales there....


@esa... you said it yourself though... you have a gaming PC, so the wii, by destroying the idea of HD consoles as cheap gaming PC will leave you only with a gaming PC...and retro consoles as they were before this gen.
Well at least that is what I think he meant.

Yeah but Metacritic/Gamerankings are not measures of quality, therefore this thread well it kinda fails...

Reviewers do get bribed.  Perhaps you missed my earlier post?

"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event."

— Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing

it's a a WRPG. =P

Correlation does not equal causation, especially in a situation of industrywide bias (the one weakness Gamerankings truly has any weakness to, but one against which it is utterly helpless). This renders your numbers meaningless and your conclusions invalid: nothing more than the product of seeing what you want to see.

Another way to interpret the numbers is that the reason so few titles correspond to so much of the total software sales on this systems is that the PS3 and especially 360 simply don't have very many worthwhile games, and that despite the reviews, the Wii ultimately has more good games. Therefore, its top games provide for less of the system's software sales because its lineup is more diverse at the highest quality levels.