Are sales the best indicator of overall quality in games?

[Squilliam]

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!

If the nature of a game restricts its potential audience then why not consider that nature to be an inherrant flaw? If a game has what is considered to be broken gameplay then that is a flaw because the gameplay is not up to standard. If the way the gameplay is structured is broken for many people then how can that not be a flaw of the same nature if all flaws introduced into games are deliberately put there for any number of reasons. Just because a few can look past the flaws doesn't mean they aren't there.

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!

Doesn't a thing need to have desirable qualities to be of any worth? Any given thing has qualities, but they have to be desirable qualities before it can be considered a high quality product. Therefore high quality would really mean that the thing has a lot of highly desirable qualities.

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.

–noun http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/quality
1.an essential or distinctive characteristic, property, or attribute: the chemical qualities of alcohol.
2.character or nature, as belonging to or distinguishing a thing: the quality of a sound.
3.character with respect to fineness, or grade of excellence: food of poor quality; silks of fine quality.
4.high grade; superiority; excellence:

–adjective
16.of or having superior quality: quality paper.
17.producing or providing products or services of high quality or merit: a quality publisher.

Even so the nature of these definitions are arbitrary. The reason why I wonder about quality being indicitive of sales is that all over forums and internet blogs and articles I see products being disparaged for essentially made up flaws and it doesn't matter whether they are games or software or physical goods like the iPhone or the iPad. Many good qualities can be glossed over or ignored in focus of the percieved bad ones so this is the reason why I wonder if sales are a better indication of how good a product is over and above reviews and feedback from interested/disinterested people on the topic.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Doesn't a thing need to have desirable qualities to be of any worth? Any given thing has qualities, but they have to be desirable qualities before it can be considered a high quality product. Therefore high quality would really mean that the thing has a lot of highly desirable qualities.

Not necesasarily. A thing could have one highly desirable quality and lots and lots of other poor quality aspects, and still be popular.

–adjective
16.of or having superior quality: quality paper.
17.producing or providing products or services of high quality or merit: a quality publisher.

These will be measurable in some way. What features of paper give it a sense of quality? Density, fibre size, fibre type, etc. Same with games.

So let's take an example. There's a pop group, very, very popular. They produce a T-shirt with an exclusive design. This T-shirt is popular and sells millions on account of the design and association with the band. It is a fly-weight material, scratchy to wear, the seems all wear out in a few months, the colours fade just as quickly, and the transfer comes off.

Is that T-shirt a thing of quality because it had an association with popular culture, or did it sell irrespective of the quality of the merchandise?

 

[Billy Idol]

My take on this question:

games are a highly subjective media! Like for instance music: We all agree (I guess?) that for instance Lady Gaga selling tons, does not necessarily mean that her music has highest quality.
Subjective means that each person typically has a drastic/slight different taste, which results in different receptions of a game. At the end, I really think that commercial success has a big portion of luck: good product, right advertising, right release time, hype, ...

 

[Arwin]

Quality is something you'll have to quantify if you want to have a sensible discussion on it.

That said, I'm fairly sure that quality and sales aren't necessarily related. There is a lot of stuff that strongly supports that:
- brand tie-in games. They sell by virtue of the popularity of the brand. The actual quality has surprisingly little impact on its sales versus the impact that this has for instance on game reviewers.
- unpopular genre-types versus audience-taste: a perfect fighter or a perfect RTS game is still not going to sell nearly as much as a merely decent shooter on the 360.
- marketing: a successful marketing campaign can strongly impact game sales.

These are some of the bigger arguments against quality being implied by the sales-success of games.

A long time ago back when I was at university, we had an overview course on the various types of literary criticism. At the end I drew a map with the book at the center, its writer on the left and its reader on the right, placed in a circle that expands from the book to basically the galaxy, and then mapped in what parts the various approaches to literary criticism covered. I think you can do a very similar thing with games, but also with what parts contribute to its success (zeitgheist, marketing, branding, politics, trends, platform audience, critical reception, game mechanics and technical aspects, etc)

 

[ShadowRunner]

Sales do not indicate the quality of a product at all, they indicate its appeal. A product will be the same quality the day before release when it hasnt sold a thing as it will be after selling 10 mil.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

games are a highly subjective media! Like for instance music: We all agree (I guess?) that for instance Lady Gaga selling tons, does not necessarily mean that her music has highest quality.
Subjective means that each person typically has a drastic/slight different taste...

Which is not the same as quality. I can appreciate a high quality game as being high quality, or a high quality film, or high quality meal made from high quality ingredients, even if they don't appeal to my tastes. Someone could record a good piece of music and encode it with a low-quality encoding, such that I can nenjoy listening to it but recognise a lack of quality. While someone else could play a Stradivarius violin in the Albert Hall for uncompromised audio quality, but play it badly for a terrible noise no-one would want to listen to.

 

[Billy Idol]

Which is not the same as quality. I can appreciate a high quality game as being high quality, or a high quality film, or high quality meal made from high quality ingredients, even if they don't appeal to my tastes. Someone could record a good piece of music and encode it with a low-quality encoding, such that I can nenjoy listening to it but recognise a lack of quality. While someone else could play a Stradivarius violin in the Albert Hall for uncompromised audio quality, but play it badly for a terrible noise no-one would want to listen to.

Ok, but what quality standards would you set for a game?

Resolution? level of AA? Texture work? Length of game? Quality of cutscene movies? HDR? Motion Blur? Check-point system? Voice acting? Story? Framerate? Gameplay? Number of different moves? Number of enemy types/boss types? Number of different settings? Soundtrack? SP only, or +MP? facial animation? animation? physics?

Although these seem to be very objective measurements...it still depends on your personal perception when rating their importance. A game XY which excels in one of these criteria, and falls back in another: person A thinks that it is a high quality game, person B don't...because they prefer different things...that is why I believe that quality in the context of a game is mainly subjective!

Of course, I am not talking about an open platform, where all of the above could be optimal , but I am talking about the current generation of consoles, where compromises are needed!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Ok, but what quality standards would you set for a game?

In what context? For a minimum for it to be considered a good game? I wouldn't bother. You can find entertinament in all sorts of places, and I wouldn't hold any developer to stick to a minimum resolution, AA amount, and anything else in your list. They just create what they want to create/feel will do well, we'll play them, buying some games more than other, and some of us will like them and some won't.

 

[dobwal]

There is no way to measure quality perfectly. As individuals we all have different tastes and perception of quality. But in general, sales can be used to equate quality. Its not perfect, but if your games purchases were strictly based on sales, you would have far more quality games than duds in your library.

Sales are the result of many factors but mostly appeal and marketing. And while pubs are no where near perfect when it comes to picking titles. They target genres that appeal to gamers in general and pour development and marketing dollars into those projects.

Nevertheless, how much this approach is viable for any particular individual lies with their unique tastes. The approach will probably work well for any gamers who tastes parallel well with general gamers, but suck for those who tastes are eclectic or less mainstream in nature.

 

[function]

I don't know which I trust least - games sales or Metacritic scores.

 

[101998]

There is a great quote by Dr Dre that I have always loved. “A successful product is 20% product quality and 80% marketing.” The quality of the product (assuming it isn’t total shit) has very little to do with actual sales in my experience. Most people, and companies, don’t know how to market products for shit, they just throw piles of money out there with no strategy.

Personally I would say there is no ‘one thing’ that is an indicator of quality.

 

[corduroygt]

It's a good thing I don't buy games based on sales, because I enjoy Fallout 3 more than any Nintendo game ever released. It's also not that high quality, the graphics are rough, it freezes a lot and forces me to do a restart, but it's more fun. So sales or even the quality and polish of a game have nothing to do with being a good game. I believe how good a game is is subjective for every person, and high sales means it appeals to more people and their expectations of enjoyment from a video game.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's a good thing I don't buy games based on sales...

That's perhaps a valid litmus test. If you (anyone) had to buy an unknown game and play it for 20 hours would, and were given the option of either a top-selling title or a top ranked title on Metacritic, which would you choose?

 

[ShadowRunner]

Metacritic, no doubt. It does have its faults but IMO its a much better indication of the quality of a game if only in a broad sense, its certainly more inline with my feelings on most games than any other metric... If a game gets over say 80 on metacritic you know its not going to be a totaly broken mess regardless of whether the game appeals to your taste or not, the same cant be said for a high selling movie tie in.

 

[dobwal]

It's a good thing I don't buy games based on sales, because I enjoy Fallout 3 more than any Nintendo game ever released. It's also not that high quality, the graphics are rough, it freezes a lot and forces me to do a restart, but it's more fun. So sales or even the quality and polish of a game have nothing to do with being a good game. I believe how good a game is is subjective for every person, and high sales means it appeals to more people and their expectations of enjoyment from a video game.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/941/941189p1.html

You do know that Fallout 3 has shipped over 5 million units by now as it 4.7 million at the end of 2008.

 

[obonicus]

That's perhaps a valid litmus test. If you (anyone) had to buy an unknown game and play it for 20 hours would, and were given the option of either a top-selling title or a top ranked title on Metacritic, which would you choose?

I... hack my leg off at the knee and hope I don't fall into a swimming pool filled with used syringes as I hobble away?

 

[dobwal]

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.

Thats not true. Quality can be applied to very subjective matters. You can qualify the build of a product very objectively but the quality of the experience it provides is very subjective and based on individual taste.

Ultimately games aren't measured on how well games are developed but how well they are experienced. I rather play a screen tearing, framerate jugging, low textured version of UC2 than play a vsynced, 120 fps, high rez version of scrabble.

 

[corduroygt]

http://pc.ign.com/articles/941/941189p1.html

You do know that Fallout 3 has shipped over 5 million units by now as it 4.7 million at the end of 2008.

I wasn't even aware of how well it sold until I read your post. Still a far cry from wii sports games though. I played the tennis and fencing ones for 10 minutes and was disgusted by how my motions had nothing to do with what was going on in the game.

 

[corduroygt]

Metacritic, no doubt. It does have its faults but IMO its a much better indication of the quality of a game if only in a broad sense, its certainly more inline with my feelings on most games than any other metric... If a game gets over say 80 on metacritic you know its not going to be a totaly broken mess regardless of whether the game appeals to your taste or not, the same cant be said for a high selling movie tie in.

I agree with this as well. Metacritic scores are more in alignment with what I like in games (of course not perfect, I hate fighting games for example) compared to sales.

 

[zed]

I saw this today
Avatar, the game widely panned has sold 2.7 million copies!