Are sales the best indicator of overall quality in games?

[Squilliam]

Im not talking about quality in a qualified sense where you can say for core gamers on tuesdays with black hair and green eyes Halo 3 is the highest quality software ever released in the history of games. Im talking in an absolute and general sweeping sense that quality is most strongly indicated or implied by the absolute sales of the software in an absolute entertainment sense above and beyond reviews or individual subjective opinions on the merits of game software.

I just feel that often individual or group bias simply gets in the way of the actual merits of the actual product at hand. Just because the world of game reviewers and core gamer opinions on various opinions finds the qualities of software such as Wii Sports or Mario Kart lacking, does that mean that these software titles are lacking in comparison to say God of War 3 which is selling a mere fraction comparitively for example?

Game sales show how many people are willing and able to purchase any gaming product and it does not take into account subjective factors like graphics or presentation and it doesn't gloss over accessability or genre limitations in passing a review of the software in question. Reviews tend to limit themselves to the value of their own userbase. They don't speak for the entire market, just the people who share similar opinions and abilities in relation to gaming.

Since games are first and foremost entertainment products then their value ought to be in relation to the entertainment value they produce. So whilst outside factors like advertising may assist a game to sell many more units it doesn't cause games to become outstanding success stories on its own. Games can sell remarkably well based off name recognition alone however previous good work and brand recognition are simply based off previous good work made by the publisher and developer because some assurance of a likeable product with familiar attributes is a positive quality of any game which possesses it.

I believe that if one title sells 10M units and one title sells 1M units the former obviously is a higher quality title in an absolute sense over the latter. This doesn't discount the subjective factors which may change individual preferrences, however as a consequence it probably does make Nintendo the highest quality developer of game software in the console game industry in an absolute sense, individual feeling may differ however.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

No (in answer to the title without reading the rest of anything else ). SOTC barely made it into the top ten of the UK charts at luanch IIRC, whereas the utterly panned "Little Britain" game hit number one and sold a million or somesuch.

Hype and marketing has too much influence, same as any other commercial arts.

 

[Squilliam]

No (in answer to the title without reading the rest of anything else ). SOTC barely made it into the top ten of the UK charts at luanch IIRC, whereas the utterly panned "Little Britain" game hit number one and sold a million or somesuch.

Hype and marketing has too much influence, same as any other commercial arts.

But SOTC was also a very flawed game in many respects given the fact that it was difficult to play, had terrible frame-rates and the object of the game wouldn't appeal to very many people in the first place. I guess people would rather act out Little Britain fantasies than kill big ugly giants.

In respect to hype and marketing there are also some very good examples of games which sold exceptionally well over a long period of time whereby hype and marketing couldn't account for more than a fraction of the overall sales of a title. Consider Mario Kart or New Super Mario Brothers. Both titles sold over considerable periods of time and yet if you took their reviews as an aggregate they scored worse than titles they outsold by considerable margins.

Im not saying that sales = quality. Im just saying that sales could be a better indication of quality than reviews and personal subjective opinions.

 

[aselto]

The answer is still no. You don't know the quality unless you play it. Surely, if a game is loved by its audience, its likely to get a great word of month (Demon's Souls or Borderlands last year), but even then, the game might not be to successful due to not having mainstream appeal or accessability.With your logic, Harry Potter is the greatest book since Bible since it's sold the most. Or that football isbetter than basketball etc.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

But SOTC was also a very flawed game in many respects given the fact that it was difficult to play...

Hang on, that's different to 'quality'. SOTC was a quality product, no doubt. It may not have had appealing gameplay, but if sales indicate quality, SOTC should have sold more.
Also regards gameplay being a factor, few would know what the gameplay experience was like prior to playing, and thus buying. First week sales aren't based on prior experience, but expectations. People who bought SOTC or Little Britain expected something worth their money. Only gamers who extensively read multiple online reviews would have an informed opinion of what to expect, which I'm sure is the minority.

Im not saying that sales = quality. Im just saying that sales could be a better indication of quality than reviews and personal subjective opinions.

Little Britain was a crap game. Everything about it was cheap and poor quality. People bought it only because it was part of a franchise. If your reasons for avoiding SOTC are valid, then likewise people would have avoided Little Britain on account of it being a poor game, but they didn't. Ergo your thread title, "Are sales the best indicator of overall quality in games?" the answer has to be 'no' assuming quality is a measure of all the factors of a game from gameplay experience to graphics to audio to polish, etc.

Sales are a measure of appeal of a game, nothing more and nothing less. Quality can affect appeal, but is not the deciding factor, and hence sales can't be considered as indicative of quality. This goes for other media. Would you say Titanic and Avatar were in their times the best quality films ever? And every bestseller book is a work of extreme quality?

 

[flynn]

Some genres are more niche than others so you cannot just look at the sales alone. You would have to break up games by categories. The fact that MW2 sold more units than, let's say Forza3, does not mean the former is a better game, you need to compare similar games. Ditto for platforms.

You can have the most technically advanced engine with awesome graphics, if the game is boring nobody is going to buy it. Yet, from a programmers point of view the engine is very high quality.

On the other end you have indie games with simple graphics/engines, e.g. Tetris, that provide lots of entertainment. Are those quality games? Yes in the sense that the games deliver.

 

[nintenho]

The only time I can see this being true is if you're comparing sequels because then the demographics size for games in that genre and probably marketing budget and all those things not directly related to the game's quality are relatively equal.

Obviously something like Halo 1/2 is an exception to this rule. The first one was a complete surprise hit and so most gamers would have much higher expectations for the sequel. Plus I'm sure the marketing budget for the second game eclipsed the first one's..

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The only time I can see this being true is if you're comparing sequels because then the demographics size for games in that genre and probably marketing budget and all those things not directly related to the game's quality are relatively equal.

Sequels typically sell less though despite typically being better games, because where the sequel has had time and effort to improve on the original and add more stuff, I guess gamers have already played that game and don't care to play it again, as it were.

 

[Nesh]

Sequels typically sell less though despite typically being better games, because where the sequel has had time and effort to improve on the original and add more stuff, I guess gamers have already played that game and don't care to play it again, as it were.

I believe it has more to do with the life cycle of the platform when the sequel is released vs the original

 

[Squilliam]

Hang on, that's different to 'quality'. SOTC was a quality product, no doubt. It may not have had appealing gameplay, but if sales indicate quality, SOTC should have sold more.

But if a game doesn't have as many desirable qualities then how can it be of the highest quality in an absolute sense? Just because a few people think one product is the best game ever can never imply that it is the greatest game ever outside of that select group.

I also never said that sales = quality. I said that sales may be the best indicator of quality but its only an indicator and not an absolute metric where sales are equivalent to quality. I want to reconcile the sales a product gets with the recognition of its quality and perhaps cut through some of the subjective layers which people throw up around their favourite games.

Also regards gameplay being a factor, few would know what the gameplay experience was like prior to playing, and thus buying. First week sales aren't based on prior experience, but expectations. People who bought SOTC or Little Britain expected something worth their money. Only gamers who extensively read multiple online reviews would have an informed opinion of what to expect, which I'm sure is the minority.
Little Britain was a crap game. Everything about it was cheap and poor quality. People bought it only because it was part of a franchise. If your reasons for avoiding SOTC are valid, then likewise people would have avoided Little Britain on account of it being a poor game, but they didn't. Ergo your thread title, "Are sales the best indicator of overall quality in games?" the answer has to be 'no' assuming quality is a measure of all the factors of a game from gameplay experience to graphics to audio to polish, etc.

Are people truely that dumb? If all it took was some marketing and a supposedly dumb crowd of people then why has all the shovelware on the Wii failed to take off if all they had to do was market it to convince the dupes to buy it once?

Word of mouth starts the moment someone sticks a game into a machine somewhere and plays the game. So by the time the end of the first weeks sales come about the word would have gotten out if there were truly that many unhappy people and thus the sales would have tanked very quickly. However looking at the user reviews on Metacritic, some people obviously loved the game even if it was given one of the lowest review scores I have ever seen on Metacritic.

In any case there are always exceptions. Just as GTA IV is given quite frequently as an example of why reviewers can give terrible judgments there can always be exceptions where the sales of a game are impervious to word of mouth where almost all of the sales come within the first week. However this is never the case when talking about games in the top tier of sales brackets because their sales continue weeks and months after the initial release of the game.

Sales are a measure of appeal of a game, nothing more and nothing less. Quality can affect appeal, but is not the deciding factor, and hence sales can't be considered as indicative of quality. This goes for other media. Would you say Titanic and Avatar were in their times the best quality films ever? And every bestseller book is a work of extreme quality?

Do I think Avatar and Titanic are the best movies in a cinematographic sense? No. But I do think that they are some of the best examples of excellent entertainment across a wide range of demographics and they gave the viewing public something unique and rare which they can get from very few other movie titles at the time of release. They are two of the highest quality movies of all time and yet in a retrospective they also fall short in many ways due to various qualities which they have or lack. This is not a contradiction even though it sounds like one.

The most important value in an entertainment product is entertainment. That is the number one goal and the game which brings the most entertainment is the highest quality game. The perfect game is the game which is the most entertaining. The qualities of how a game plays, its graphical impressiveness, sound-scape, are all merely tools to that end. Therefore the number of people who seek entertainment through a game has to be the closest indicator of its absolute quality.

 

[aselto]

The most important value in an entertainment product is entertainment. That is the number one goal and the game which brings the most entertainment is the highest quality game. The perfect game is the game which is the most entertaining. The qualities of how a game plays, its graphical impressiveness, sound-scape, are all merely tools to that end. Therefore the number of people who seek entertainment through a game has to be the closest indicator of its absolute quality.

Except that indicator is totally useless. If you compare Wii Sports and Gears of War sales, all you can tell is that easily accessible E-rated social game involving physical activitiy is more popular than an M-rated shooter. But of course they were created with different goals in mind and the very nature of GoW restricts its popularity. There areofcourse more niche types of entertainment than shooters, but that doesn't make their representatives automatically worse than Gears of War!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

But if a game doesn't have as many desirable qualities then how can it be of the highest quality in an absolute sense? ...
The most important value in an entertainment product is entertainment. That is the number one goal and the game which brings the most entertainment is the highest quality game...

I think this all comes down to how you are using the term 'quality.' A thing does not need quality to be popular, nor to be of value. Some 1970s Doctor Who episodes severely lacked quality, with bubble-packing and sock-puppet monsters running amok in quarries, but they were excellent entertaiment none-the-less and worth the viewing by millions that they had.

As I understand it, your argument is really, "doesn't succesful sales of a title prove its value regardless of how well rated it is, showing review scores aren't the be-all-and-end-all?" That would be quite a different discussion to this one!

 

[obonicus]

Do you believe Nintendo makes the best games?
I don't, so no.

There's no 'best indicator' for game quality, as there's hardly any indicator that isn't garbage. At best you can try and find someone who has similar taste and try and follow their recommendations... and even then, what you'll probably find out is that your taste wasn't that similar to begin with.

 

[Jedi2016]

It really depends on how you define quality. You can make the most perfect game ever, flawlessly coded, that runs like a dream and plays like a dream, but it isn't actually any fun to play.

On the flip side (SOTC), you can have a game with flaws, and yet winds up being one of the most amazing experiences you'll ever have. Obonicus said it right.. a lot of it is in the eye of the beholder.

I know not everybody liked SOTC, and some people couldn't look beyond it's programming flaws, but what about its predecessor, ICO? I've yet to meet a person who's played the game that didn't like it. To this day, it remains one of, if not THE, best overall game I've ever played. And it sold like crap.. less than a million copies worldwide. Given the number of PS2s out there, that's something like 0.6% of all PS2 owners that got to play it.

So, by the sales=quality argument, ICO sucks because it didn't sell. So, clearly, that argument is invalid.

That seems to hold up quite often, in fact. Many of those "best games ever" lists feature those lost gems that hardly anybody played.

Now, on the argument of sales being indicative of quality? Basically the reverse of the ICO argument.. that if a game sells well, then it must be good? We've seen that that isn't the case, time and again. In my experience, most of the top-selling games out there are merely the result of high production values (which, as we know, can make a game look good, but doesn't necessarily make it good), combined with ridiculous advertising campaigns.

I'd say that long-term sales might be a somewhat good indicator. If a game sells well, and continues to sell well over the course of months or even years, then it's a good game.

But heavy advertising and hype can easily cause a flash-in-the-pan effect, where a game has tremendous first-week sales, that then drop off sharply and dismally as people begin reading reviews or getting bad word-of-mouth from the first-day buyers. The same thing happens with motion pictures, week after week.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It really depends on how you define quality.

Quality is a measurement of attainment by certain criteria - how well something last, how well it looks (painted inside the lines, lack pof rendering artefacts, high resolution, etc.), how well it does its job,and so forth. Quality is mostly objective, and quality control is an objective part of product development and production. Whether a game is perceived as good/fun or not isn't a measure of quality, and is disparate from quality. Typically higher quality products meet with higher approval, but you don't need quality to gain customer satisfaction or generate appeal.

 

[NRP]

I think sales numbers are an indicator of how well a game resonates with its auduence. Hype and marketing can perhaps push a so so game to 1-2 million in sales, but beyond that, the game must stand on its own. Games that sell 5-10 million are obviously doing most things right, which I guess could be a reasonable definition of quality.

 

[obonicus]

I would dispute that; I think that at some point there's a critical mass of hype that drives sales beyond anything mere quality could achieve.

 

[Rolf N]

As Shifty said, it's an accurate measurement of the appeal, but that is not necessarily the same as quality. Things can be very appealing and still fall apart on inspection, because they aren't executed that well. Assassin's Creed (1) should be an agreeable example: extreme, tiring repetition was a pretty common criticism, but the game still sold unthinkable numbers because stabbing people in the face while wearing a white hooded robe just seemed like such a cool idea,.

 

[Jedi2016]

As Shifty said, it's an accurate measurement of the appeal, but that is not necessarily the same as quality. Things can be very appealing and still fall apart on inspection, because they aren't executed that well. Assassin's Creed (1) should be an agreeable example: extreme, tiring repetition was a pretty common criticism, but the game still sold unthinkable numbers because stabbing people in the face while wearing a white hooded robe just seemed like such a cool idea,.

Hey, I like that game.. lol.

But, then again, I knew I would like it before it ever released. The characters, the world, the environment, appealed to me. I recognized the flaws, sure.. I even mention them to people who are thinking about buying the game. But it doesn't lessen my overall enjoyment and the freedom of the sandbox style.

 

[zed]

I think sales numbers are an indicator of how well a game resonates with its auduence. Hype and marketing can perhaps push a so so game to 1-2 million in sales, but beyond that, the game must stand on its own. Games that sell 5-10 million are obviously doing most things right, which I guess could be a reasonable definition of quality.

Mario Party 8
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games

theres been a couple of articles on gamasutra that point out the relationship between gameratings and sales to be very tenuous