What Malstrom is simply saying is that sales are the only MEASURABLE way to judge quality, except for sales. You may think something is great, but if it doesn't sell, then it obviously did something wrong, because it is appealing to few people. You say sales are because of popularity, but why is it popular? Because it appeals to the most people, thus is quality in the grand scheme of things.

Quality is a relative term. So the only way we can measure it, if ever there was a way, is through a defined measurment of sales.

There is no "god of quality" that judges what he deems great or not. You may think MGS is the best game ever, but I may think it's terrible.. So who is right?

Now we can say that continued sales are a better measure of quality than front loaded sales, since the latter means people bought a product due to marketing, not word of mouth. This applies to movies, books, and other media as well as games.

Miyamoto: "The highest goal in game design is to provide entertainment that can cross culture, age and gender."

Pong, check. Pacman, check. Tetris, check. SMB, check. Wii Sports, check.

Well, well, it seems the biggest sellers also achieve the highest goal in game design according to (probably) the greatest game designer ever.

Metacritic or Miyamoto? Hmm. Tough decision.

Very true, although there is some correlation. A lot of deisel engine games tend to do well overall.

1. That's a classic weasel. Instead of telling us why his post isn't a strawman, or at least countering the definition I've given, he's making a sweeping accusation that I don't know what the term means at all, based on this one supposed instance. If your post is accurate, tell us why. Don't try to just dodge it.

2. That is bullshit, and I can empirically prove it.

• His music posts would mention how Other M can't possible match up to these games. They don't.
• His casual fallacy posts should mention how Other M is trying to bring in women gamers. He's only brought that up on posts about the game.
• His Warren Spector post should contrast Sakamoto. He doesn't mention him or Other M in that post.
• In fact, from the current post as of writing this, "Music #57", there are 12 posts between that and the last article about Other M, and any mention of Other M and Sakamoto.

So you don't have to agree with him, but don't lie to us that he's doing something different than what he is. You think he's wrong, prove it. Don't fake the details of his postition so you can't claim it's something weaker than it is (an actual definition of a strawman).

I seem to recall some time ago saying more or less the same thing that Malstrom has said: that quantity is the only reliable measure of any product's overall quality.  Although my wording was a bit more forgiving, at least (in that I pointed out that the concept of what "quality" means changes from person to person, whereas quantity is not reliant on personal opinions; Malstrom is essentially advocating that we redefine "qaulity" to "quantity" entirely).

A tip for anyone wishing to get into analysis: metrics of quality are meaningless, and attempting to make a reputation for yourself by using such metrics will make your analyses equally meaningless.  It's an unpleasant truth to come to terms with, but it cannot be avoided: effective analysis requires a disconnect of opinion from data.  This is especially true of your own opinion; an analyst who bases all of their predictions off of their own opinion is not doing any analysis, they're just trying to sell others on their opinions.  In other words, they're just critics claiming to be analysts.

And before anyone goes and claims Malstrom can't do that, he's stated outright that his issue with some games is that they won't sell that well, not whether they will be any good. He's even admitted he doesn't like some hit games, but knows they still sell (like GTA and Just Dance).

The number one metric of quality for a video game is quality of entertainment. In that you have value -> Length of enjoyment * quality of enjoyment - cost of enjoyment (roughly speaking). I would suggest the biggest issue with video games today is the quantity of titles which offer negative value. I.E. the number of titles not worth the plastic they are printed on.

For instance Pachter said that many core gamers are playing their games longer due to the addition of multiplayer. However I really do believe hes missed the whole picture. I say that a number of core gamers are playing and buying fewer games because whilst the value for people in this generation who liked multi-player have increased, the value for single player has diminished on the DX9 consoles. So the multiplayer people are happy and buying fewer titles and the single player people are unhappy and buying fewer titles!

How do you effectively measure the entertainment value of a product?  You cannot feasibly ask every person who has played a game how well it entertained them, nor can you extrapolate any sort of reliable data from polls, surveys, or sites like Metacritic due to sample bias being so significant.  Ultimately the most reliable indicator of the overall quality of a product is how well a product sells, as a result.  A product which sells 200,000 copies has a lower overall appeal (and thus lower overall perceived quality) than a product which sells 2,000,000 copies.  Even if you personally think that the title which sold 200,000 is superior to the one that sold 2,000,000, this is irrelevant in analysis.  Analysis is not about spinning the picture around so it looks appealing to you, it's about providing a meaningful picture of the whole in spite of what you may personally want.

As I've stated elsewhere, I don't hold anything that Michael Pachter says to have any sort of analytical value.  He's already demonstrated that he has zero ethics when it comes to analysis, and zero credibility as a result.  Nor do I particularly buy the hollow theory that people are simply not buying games because they're satisfied with what they have.  Were that the case, there would never have been any consoles made after the Atari 2600.  The market would have died with the crash of 1983-1984 and stayed dead if people were that easily satisfied.

You can have the most fun in your life on a video game, but if the game lasts 10 minutes and you never want to play it again, is that worth a full price of entry of $60? If you had the misfortune of buying a game which only had 10 minutes of gameplay for $60 would you not also tell your friends about how bad it is and that they should choose something else? I say my equation is roughly good enough for discussion even if its not perfect.

In this age, the fun actually is measurable. Do you remember quotes from Microsoft saying that the average Halo 3 player has played for more than 100 hours? Have you seen Peter M from Lionhead state recently that 60% of features in Fable 2 were barely used? They know which games are played, how long they are played for and they have a pretty good idea who is playing them. They know things like 50% of people who played through Gears 2 did so on an HDTV, they also know that Coop is a large and important feature. Fun is something that people return to, they will continue to extract value from a good game and they will stop quite quickly on a bad one.

If Microsoft were to blow open their entire library of analytics you would know instantly which are the best Xbox 360 games and which are the worst. You wouldn't need sales, metacritic or any other metric. Sales are the closest we have to the analytics that Xbox Live gives Microsoft which I doubt they share beyond a close knit group of 1st/2nd parties. Consider for instance how Fable 2 -> 3 is evolving. Better coop? Check! Streamlined interface? Check! Etc, and this is the result of the analytics they had access to.