Some followup studies

As a followup to my local data breakdown, I thought I’d link to some other interesting findings:

Added 17/11/09: Marketing influences games more than ratings

Survey: Game Score-to-Sale Theory Again Disproven

A study from 2006 that concludes no correlation between sales & score.

When Pundits Attack: Game Sales vs Game Quality

This compares metacritic rating to overall sales for 1281 games during the PS2 era.

Each metacritic point is worth 7.7 extra sales per day

Some data extracted from between March 2007 & March 2008

The influence of metacritic on games sales

A more recent study from May 2009.

Collated data from my IGDA presentation

In the interests of transparency, I’ve made available the data from my IGDA talk as a published google spreadsheet.  You can find it here.

To gather the numbers, I used metacritic‘s advanced search restricted to developers (here‘s an example using Torus) and hand-copied the results straight into a spreadsheet.

In some cases, where data wasn’t available on metacritic and there was more than one sku for the game, I used gamerankings.com for a representative value.

To select by ‘unique’ title versus ‘port’ in cases where there was more than one version (both Heroes of the Pacific and Heroes over Europe are good examples) I treated the highest rated version as the ‘unique’ and the other versions as ‘ports’ of that. All versions of Heroes of the Pacific rated 76% so it’s just a function of a sorting algorithm that I took the Xbox version as the original. In the case of Heroes over Europe, the PC version rated 66% compared to 64% on PS3 and 62% on Xbox 360 so that’s treated as the lead platform and the others as ports.

Because of the way metacritic gathers reviews & collates data, there are omissions, so if anyone has additional data, feel free to email it to me or post it in the comments and I’ll update it.

The state of things

Last night at the reboot of the Melbourne IGDA chapter, I gave a short talk on the state of things locally and options for indie developers.  The full presentation is available below, but I thought I’d make the first half – the data on metacritic scores – a bit more accessible.

For more information on the second half – opportunities for independent developers – check out Simon Carless’ and David Edery’s presentations from Film Victoria‘s Digital Distribution Summit:

Simon Carless (from here)

Indie Game Metrics  – October 2009

Western Indie Game Trends

Digital Distribution Summit Video

David Edery

Digital Distribution Summit keynote

A more detailed breakdown of the numbers is below the fold…

Read moreThe state of things

November EGP

Well, too many other projects took over last month – including helping to set up the Melbourne branch of the IGDA, presenting at iDef, and working on some other things that it’s too early to talk about. As a result, my October game didn’t really evolve beyond the previous iteration.  I did manage to hook up collision and put torches and coins in, but it still wasn’t really a game. Hopefully November will be different because this month, I’ve decided to follow the theme used on experimentalgameplay.com, and this month it’s ‘Art Game’.

Head over to the Freeplay forums to join other people in Melbourne doing the same thing.