Yes, but sales are objective facts. Reviews never are.

Err, this doesn't make much sense. You're mixing up two logically distinct levels.

The fact that Edge gave 9 to Persona 4 is as objective a fact as the sales of Persona 4.

How that correlates to the perceived quality of the game for a given gamer is a totally different issue. One might not agree with Edge, or love a game that had poor sales. In both cases there are multiple layers of indirection between the objective facts and your personal experience.

At the same time the metascore is in no way indicative of an "objective quality" of the game per se.  A non-owner should actually read the reviews and find whatever resonates with his interests and experience (details about known mechanics, settings, similitudes with other games).

Even worse counting the metascores over 90 to define "AAA", not thinking about context, time, error margins. From which we should assume that we should buy GRAW instead of the sequel, or that Rock Band 1 and Geometry Wars contribute to a game library more "objective value" than Uncharted.

WereKitten, we can accept that an aggregate is an objective fact in the sense that it represents what different sites have graded games, yes, but the implication here is that the aggregate opinion presented on a game is itself objective, which it is not. That is the point I was making. We do not actually disagree.

the little metacritic statistic is misleading as hell, if you take that percentage down 5 points to 85%,(still good score) then the ps3 wins. i work at a gamestop i see the ebb and flow of average joe consumers looking at the walls we have in our store, and the xbox one is bigger and we do make more money off of it, i say the attention they both get is equal. i think the "better games" argument has ended. if u wanna say more games by all means go for it.

@Khuutra

We agree about the reviews,
I was nitpicking on your comparison with sales, which was a logically wrong side step. I expect better of you, with those awe-inspiring spectacles and eyebrows.

Tssssssssssssss

The point about sales is two-fold. In the first place, sales are a better indicator of public opinion or general consensus or whatever Starcraft called it: sales, especially sales over time, are a much greater indicator of how much people tend to like games, particularly games that they show to friends who then buy it. Word of mouth plays an important role in Nintendo's evergreen titles. If you want to see what the public likes best, look at the games that stay in the top 50 for longest.

The other half of it is that sales are nonthing except for an objective set of facts: there is no interpretation involved in any step of the process of recording sales, unless you want to go so far as to say that people making choices about which games ot buy ruins the objectivity of this set of facts (which I don't believe you would). That reviews themselves exist as they is an objective fact, that Edge reviewed such and such a game in such and such a way is a fact, but hte review itself is still a subjective interpretation of an experience base on certain value sets which may or may not be universal depending on the audience.

My point is that reviews are not objective. Aggregate scores are just objective compiling of subjective pronunciations of quality, and that reviews themselves exist in fact does not change that they are not, nor are they ever objective indicators of quality.

coming form xboxist whatever thats pretty remarkable

@Khuutra

I understand your first point about sales and "general consensus".

The second half contains, again, the logical fallacy: you compared the sales factual content - they exist, in a certain amount - with something very different in reviews - their accuracy - and said that sales are more objective because their number is.

The sales number being objective has nothing to do with the correlation between sales and quality being good or being better than in reviews. If I know 3 people who think that the earth is flat, the objectiveness of the number 3 has nothing to do with the objectiveness of their belief.

Reviews cannot be accurate or inaccurate, because that implies that there is a universal value set to which all games are trying to adhere.

There isn't.

^Agreed about universal value, and yet irrelevant.
Read my posts again, I always talk about a single specific gamer. In which case the final value of the game is well defined by his/her opinion. I did the same assumption in my previous post, thus accuracy means how much sales or reviews will correlate with my user's final judgment.
But the gist of it was totally different and admittedly not worth so many words - I think we agree on the subject at hand, anyway.