Okay, this is officially becoming the weirdest argument ever.

No, quality (as defined by metacritic) doesn't equal sales. We know this. And any games that are bad will have less sales, but they will still have sales. Do you think there are people who enjoy a game which is currently rated 60 or so on metacritic? Yes there are, but what are the odds these people actually went to metacritic?

I think that anyone who hangs out on the internet, talks about games and knows about metacritic, will know exactly what they are after, and it's these people who will be turned off by many low reviews. If the system changed, they would have to adapt, and they would.

Furthermore, comparing Killzone 2 to Noby Noby Boy? How is that not the weirdest comparison in the history of gaming? You can't say "Well, they got the same score, so they must be equally good", because they are different games, reviewed by different people. If anyone are pondering whether to buy Killzone 2 or Noby Noby Boy, they should either buy both or go earn some more money.

And the final score is only the punctuation at the end of your review. Nobody sees the score Eurogamer gave a game and goes "I'll never be getting that!" without reading some part of the review (raving fanboys excluded).

First Paragraph:

In a very simplistic broad understanding of the system you are correct. However it does affect sales for a lot of people. There are people inbetween the people like you and me, and the people who judge based on the cover. Some of these people just use one website for reviews and do trust the scores. Not everyone goes to metacritic, but a lot of people get a review one way or another.

Second P:

Why would those people be turned off by low reviews any more than other demographics. From what I can tell, many people on this very site don't give a damn about low scores when buying a new game. I think the people that are most affected are those inbetween people I mentioned before who might look at maybe one review and that's it. As far as adapting, you can't prove that, and the only evidence relevant to that argument is the one I previously expounded upon. (being more expensive, people require a harder push.)

Third P:
Instead of giving you some other example that you will just run in circles again, I'll approach it differently. On the scale of 0-1 how good is a certain game. 0 being bad, 1 being excellent.  You can see the trouble immediately.

0-1 scale is to 0-10 scale, as 0-10 scale is to 0-100 scale. 0-10 is too constrained. The point of comparing games in my first example is analogous to the idea of 100 scale. 0-10 MIGHT be enough for a review of one game (for some people), but once you start getting scores to compare them to, 0-10 starts losing strength as many things will end up being the same. I forget the rule in psych statistics, but whenever a certain number of things end up being equal and refinement is possible, then refinement should occur. THat's just something I know from stats that has been proven by people much smarter than I.

4th P:

You are right about that. However, once you start getting a lot of games on the market, say 3-400, suddenly you really only start looking at the 80+ games on a metacritic type list. Sort by score and then look at the top 20% or so. If you have specific interests you refine the list.

But these are also the people who look at movie scores in the newspaper, and maybe use IMDB, and compared to the system everyone else is using, game ratings would seem inflated. The only reason one might not make that call from metacritic, is because of the colorcoding. And the newspaper game reviews I find from time to time, judge videogames on the same basis as any other media they review.

Yes, I see I contradict myself in my post... But I doubt the in-between people will actually be much affected by it, mainly because I think they are used to dealing with other kinds of reviews where the scores are in fact more in line with the 10-system, and not inflated like in the videogame reviews.

And no, I can't prove the adapting. But I believe that when more reviews will shift toward this scale for reviewing, the fanboys can moan all they want, because it wont change the general direction the industry is taking, just like fanboy moaning wont stop the Wii from selling, and just like all the moaning about VGC 2.0 has stopped after a few issues were sorted out, and people have gotten used to it.

See, I think that the 0-100 scale leaves too many options for reviewers, and it is much better to have a more clear cut scores out on sites. The 0-10 system works fine on IMDB, where users can rate games from 0 to 10, and on the top 250 list of greatest films of all time, there are three movies with an average score of 9.0+.

I think the 0-10 system is fine, simply because people don't know how to use it yet, and so we have gone prematurely to the 0-100 range. How does Rockstar improve on GTA4? The game is perfect, there is hardly any criticism, because everyone were too blinded by hype and and fanboyism to actually see through the game, and so perfect scores were handed out left and right.

Then it doesn't matter what system we use, the only difference will be how many hits they get for 80+ reviewed games. If someone are out to do it this way, then they will not go for a "low quality" game, regardless what review range we are working with. Although if the person knows if the system average is 5 or 7, will of course affect where they set the lower border for what results are accepted.