We like to believe that review scores have the most influence on games' sales, but research by EEDAR has indicated otherwise.
Speaking at the Montreal International Games Summit, EEDAR's Jesse Divnich revealed that their research has found that marketing budget has a much more significant effect on games' sales than review scores do.
"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," he reaffirmed.
"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 videogame. The reason why that is is that 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."
EEDAR looked at all the games released in 2007 and 2008 before reaching this conclusion. They also found that Nintendo DS games are the most unaffected by review scores. "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... This actually suggests to developers that if you can, sacrifice quality to get a higher marketing budget."
