Sep 24, 02:11 AM

Reviews don't matter?

Apparently game reviews don’t matter all that much (via Next-Gen), according to a recent report by Susquehanna International Group.

If sales are not significantly tied to how good a game actually is, then what hope does anyone have? Have those genius marketers won? People want to make good, fun, innovative games – if they succeed, there’s still a chance that a worse game could do better? That is seriously disturbing.

I’d like to propose 2 alternative explanations for these findings.

  1. Game reviewers are out of touch with the mainstream. If you want to think that actual sales are a true indicator of a game’s quality, then this has to be the first conclusion. What is the cause of this disconnect? The debate continues: there’s no formal method of reviewing a game, game reviewers aren’t professional enough, it’s hard to evaluate a game on just the beginning, etc…
  1. There are serious inefficiencies in the game market. There’s still a lot of information asymmetry when buying games today. Even with those great reviews mentioned in #1, it is still very difficult to estimate how much you will like a game before you buy it. Since buying a new game is a significant commitment in terms of both time and money, consumers have to rely on other, less direct, sources for info on their games such as word of mouth or official websites. These channels sometimes aren’t the best channels either. And so some good games get overlooked, and some bad games get overbought. Episodic gaming will go a long way in solving this problem – just making the market that much more efficient.
-Jon
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