Delayed reviews and the impact on sales (Destiny)
Well then, I think we can surmise for ourselves why the reviews were really delayed in this case.
I'm left to wonder, now with even the big boys of the review world weighing in with shockingly low review scores, how many units were sold based on lack of available reviews? If these reviews were available 3-4 days in advance of the game being released, how many fewer games would have been sold? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? It was going to sell a lot based on how marketed and high profile it was anyhow. If I had the ability to see alternate realities, I would use it to answer questions like these. And for really noble stuff too of course.
Reminds me of Diablo 3. Reviews weren't available at launch for that either, and it sold something like 10 million copies in the first few days, but the fan backlash was severe and the expansion sold at a fraction of the pace of the original (to their credit, Blizzard seems to have righted the ship on that one, but I know I felt burned originally).
Delayed reviews and the impact on sales
LOL. This game had one of gaming's biggest marketing campaigns and a hype train faster than the goddamn Shinkansen. I'm sure it sold just fine. Online reviews aren't that important for AAA games like this.
I'd wager that sales will only be impacted now that so many negative reviews have come out... a week after launch, at which point it won't make much of a difference anyway.
The truly interesting part will how well Destiny 2 sells.
Delayed reviews and the impact on sales
Perhaps I didn't convey the meaning of my post clearly, but what I meant was I wonder what would have happened if the reviews had been available before launch, and what impact that would have had on sales, not how are the bad reviews going to impact sales.
Delayed reviews and the impact on sales
I know what you meant. I'm saying negative reviews probably would not have had much of an impact on sales at all. The marketing and hype for this game was so strong that most average consumers would have bought it anyway. Add the die-hard fans who bought it just because it's a Bungie game (myself included) and the Halo fans who bought it just because it was made by the same people that made Halo...
And you're forgetting how closely these review sites are wrapped around the publishers' fingers.
Delayed reviews and the impact on sales
The evidence would suggest they're not quite wound tightly enough ;).
Delayed reviews and the impact on sales
Point taken. These negative reviews have definitely caught me by surprise, not because Destiny doesn't deserve them (because it absolutely does), but because I did not expect so many reviewers to have the balls to defy a major publisher like this.
I can't wait for IGN to look like morons next week when they give it a 9/10.
Do reviews *ever* affect sales?
by ShadowOfTheVoid 
, South Carolina, Saturday, September 13, 2014, 21:21 (3523 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.
This^^^^
The goddamn Shinkansen indeed. So much hype!