At the Montreal International Game Summit, industry analyst Jesse Divnich (the director of analyst services at EEDAR) dropped an interesting bombshell: When it comes to games, critical scores don't matter as much as marketing. According to Divnich's research, marketing money influences game sales three times as much as reviews.

How much review scores influence sales is console-specific, according to Divnich. “Review scores don’t matter on DS,” he said, using critical darling Scribblenauts as an example -- just about every critic raved about the DS puzzle game, but it's not the top-selling DS game of all time by a long, long shot.

"The DS audience is very unique and much different than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360," Divnich elaborated in an email. "DS consumers are not visiting G4TV.com or tuning into the network to catch  the latest reviews. This is an audience that is heavily influenced by marketing,"

Divnich's (depressing) take-away from the Montreal Game Summit: “There is no compelling reason to focus on quality, you should literally just spend that money and time on marketing."

It's hard to argue with Divnich and company's finding. As games become a less niche-oriented entertainment, the public response seems to be leaning closer to responses to movies, where marketing seems to trump critics every time. But what about those games/movies that have great critical response and huge marketing budgets, but still don't sell all that well?

Take a game like Mirror's Edge --  respectable review scores and a big enough marketing budget and yet sales were not through the proverbial roof, although Divnich says, "For games that had a similar review score, marketing budget, and were in the Action genre (14 games applied), Mirror’s Edge commercial success was within the average range among the 14 similar games."

On the other hand, the Wii game Carnival Games had neither a huge marketing budget nor particularly good reviews, but was a breakout hit.

"Carnival Games is a great example of how word of mouth and product packaging can influence sales," Divnich said. "Carnival Games’ packaging pretty much spells out the type of game it is and how one would likely play it. It’s that simplicity that made the game so successful. Remember, anyone who bought Carnival Games is likely not the same consumer who crawls the web for the latest trailers or reviews of a title."

I maintains that there are impossible-to-quantify or understand factors that play into the success or failure of a game. Like the combination of timing, subject matter, packaging, genre, Astrological alignment and the exactly positioning of the cultural zeitgeist at the moment of release. But I'm a romantic like that -- it's not like I have research to back me up or anything; just intuition, and you can neither buy nor sell that commodity. I'll let Divnich have the last word in our non-argument:

"The commercial success or failure of a video game isn’t just about quality and marketing. Hundreds of other factors are at play. Branding, genre, release timing, release schedule, pricing, packaging, multiplayer, etc. However, quality and marketing play the largest role in most cases."

(FYI: You really should pay more attention to reviews from trusted sources than commercials -- it just makes sense.)

Source: Edge