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These days it’s rare to read an interview with a high ranking games industry exec without Metacritic scores cropping up at least once, yet according to research carried out by EEDAR these review scores may not be as valuable as previously believed.
EEDAR’s Jesse Divnich, speaking at the Montreal International Game Summit, revealed that the latest research indicates that marketing has a much greater influence on a game’s sales than review scores.
“You can make the greatest game and it won’t even matter. I know that’s discouraging to developers at first but it’s very true,” Divnich told the MIGS audience.
“Marketing influences game revenue three times more than quality scores. There’s a giant myth out there that reviews scores are the most crucial to a video game. The reason why that is is the information is readily available – we can go to Metacritic – and we see games like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty succeed and we see they have a high quality score and we make that correlation. But the truth is, marketing actually has much more of an influence to game sales than high scores.”
According to Divnich, developers working on titles for the Nintendo DS might as well “sacrifice quality to get a higher marketing budget”.
“This basically means that review scores for the Nintendo DS don’t matter. If you’re making a DS game don’t even bother on quality, just ask for a bunch of marketing dollars,” explained Divnich.
Do you value review scores? While you’re posting an opinion in the comments section below we’re off to the job centre.
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