WiiNintendo

Reviews really never mattered to me.  Hey, Bloody Roar: Primal Fury scored bad for Cube, on Nintendo Power, but it’s a great game. 

The power of Gamerankings and like-minded aggregators is not lost on publishers and publicists. How games score is quoted on the back of boxes, quoted to us in dealings with PR — these numbers matter, or do they?A study cited over at Next Generation from SIG expands on a report from last year and concludes (again) that “After going through multiple scenarios, we believe a game rating, in most cases, is not a reliable tool for predicting game sales. There are isolated examples of strong correlation, but they are just that — isolated.”

That’s not to say that reviews don’t influence sales, SIG’s Jason Kraft told Next-Gen that they do play a part in sales, just not to the extent that people may believe: “The impact review scores have on predicting sales is not as significant as previously thought. Obviously, it does impact sales, but there are far more useful indicators such as when the game is released, the franchise’s history.”

Does this mean that publishers and PR representatives will stop waving aggregate scores in our faces and promoting how a game scored on the back of its box? If not used for purchasing decisions, what is the role of the reviewer? There’s several schools of thought on how games should be reviewed and what gamers use reviews for, so, dear readers, what do you use reviews for? What purpose do reviews serve you?
Source

Discuss this and more in our forums.
Follow WiiNintendo on Twitter.
Subscribe to our RSS Feed.