Gamers generally do not rely on game reviews from official sources when determining their purchases, according to the results of a survey conducted by the Cowen Group.
Analyst Doug Cruetz says that when it came to listening to advice on how good the latest games, most gamers rely more on word of mouth than the opinions of official reviewers. The analyst also noted that in a climate where it is believed some ‘official’ reviews may be being pressured into being written, the companies involved may well be wasting their time. “We believe that while Metacritic scores may be correlated to game scores and word of mouth, and thus somewhat predictive of title performance, they are unlikely in and of themselves to drive or undermine the success of a game,” Cruetz concluded in the survey, before adding somewhat sniffily, “We note this, in part, because of persistent rumours that some game developers have been jawboning game reviewers into giving their games higher critical review scores. We believe the publishers are better served by spending their time on the development process than by grade grubbing after the fact.”
While Cruetz’s conclusions may seem rather snippy, many gamers have backed them up, with a noticeable amount of users citing the phenomenally successful “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” as an example of a game whose ‘official’ critical response was perhaps more universally positive than it really deserved. “I generally trusted reviews until I seen what “MW2” got,” one gamer, echoing the sentiments of manty, wrote on computerandvideogames.com. “That was disgusting.”
