Do reviews *ever* affect sales? (Destiny)

by ShadowOfTheVoid , South Carolina, Saturday, September 13, 2014, 21:21 (3734 days ago) @ car15

It always seems like sales and review scores are rarely congruent with each other. Let's look at the five biggest titles of the year so far in the U.S. (not including Destiny) along with their Metacritic scores:

Watch Dogs: 80 (PS4); 78 (XBO)
Titanfall: 86
Mario Kart 8: 88
Infamous Second Son: 80
The Last of Us Remastered: 95

Looking at past years, Call of Duty is consistently a top-selling game, topping the charts in the U.S. every year that doesn't have a new GTA game. However, the series has been declining critically for the last several installments. While MW3 got a 94 metascore, Black Ops got an 87, MW3 got an 88, Black Ops II got an 83, and Ghosts got a 78 (for the PS4 & XBO versions; the PS3 & 360 versions got a 71 and 73 respectively).

Even Halo has declined critically over the years. Halo 1 has a metascore of 97, while Halo 2's is 95, Halo 3's is 94, Reach's is 91, and Halo 4's is 87. However, Halo 2 sold better than Halo 1, and it was in turn outsold by Halo 3, while Reach and Halo 4 had comparable sales performance to Halo 3.

Looking at other forms of entertainment, probably the most notable example of critically panned films becoming box office successes is the live-action Transformers film series. Critics hate them, but audiences keep flocking to theaters in droves to watch them.

Long point short, critical success correlates poorly with commercial success. General audiences just don't give a rat's ass what the critics say. If something is appealing and well-marketing, it'll sell, even if it's not the most polished thing the in world. If critical success always translated to good sales, then Ocarina of Time should be the best-selling game ever, BioShock should have been the best-selling shooter of last generation, and nominees for Best Picture Oscar should consistently top the box office.