IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Game Reviews Can Amplify or Reduce Word of Mouth Buzz, finds Study

Posted July 6, 2010 by James Brightman

In recent years, publishers have seemingly placed a greater and greater impact on Metacritic scores, and there's a reason for that; positive reviews or negative reviews do seem to have an impact on a title's sales. The folks at EEDAR, in collaboration with SMU Guildhall, recently conducted a new study on the impact of critic reviews and ultimately found that "the relationship between video game sales and professional review scores are not correlative but causal."

More specifically,  EEDAR said the study "suggests that high critic reviews have a strong positive impact on the likelihood of positive word-of-mouth recommendations. Professional critic reviews act as a multiplier for the likelihood of a consumer positively recommending the game to a friend." 

EEDAR added, "Critic reviews are especially important because of the uni-directional relationship between review scores and word of mouth. Critic reviews can amplify or reduce the viral spread of word-of-mouth marketing, but word of mouth does not usually influence critic reviews."

EEDAR acknowledges, of course, that game sales can be affected by marketing, PR, licensing and a whole host of factors, but review scores are hugely important it seems. This can be somewhat discouraging to developers whose very jobs are sometimes at stake due to whether they hit a certain Metacritic target or not. "As painful as it may be for developers to consider, even with the creation of a high quality game, a game is likely to achieve greater commercial success if reviewed highly, than if reviewed poorly or not at all," EEDAR noted. 

To reach these conclusions, EEDAR and SMU had three groups play the game Plants vs. Zombies. One group was exposed first to mock positive reviews (score of 90/100), another to mock negative reviews (61/100) and another to no reviews at all. The three groups were all pre-screened to make sure that they weren't previously familiar with Plants vs. Zombies.

Ultimately, "the group shown high review scores prior to playing Plants vs. Zombies gave the game a mean review score 20% higher (14 points) than the group shown low review scores. This group also gave the game a mean review score 8 percent (6 points) higher than the control group with no review score anchor." Furthermore, "91% of participants shown high review scores for Plants vs. Zombies would recommend the product to a friend, compared to only 65% of participants shown low review scores and 79% of participants shown no review."

EEDAR notes that the findings in this study should be applied to marketing and PR tactics, with these groups doing more to highlight positive scores, perhaps even on game packaging to stand out on store shelves. 

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.