Video Game Reviews
There are a lot of aspects that may have contributed to the game’s success, and reviews can be a contributing factor. One of Nintendo’s most anticipated game franchise, has released one of its highest selling games last year which is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild. The game has been reviewed Early Access by several top game review sites. People have fallen in love with this gaming experience, its design, systems, and structures. Most of those sites if not all wrote down perfect scores which made the game land in the best-reviewed game ever list on Metacritic. Picture this: a well-known game plus good reviews from well-known sites? I doubt that not a single gamer in this world has been moved by influence. To no surprise, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild became a game with hit sales as well. According to Destructoid, Nintendo reported an 8.48 million sales of the game on the Switch alone, but there are 1.5 million sales more on Wii U version. Even for already popular games with strong fan bases, we can tell from Nintendo’s case that good reviews portray and contribute to the overall great reception.
However, it’s a whole different story for indie game developers who are being with this pay stubs template free software. There are indie games produced in great quality or shape, but still hard to market even with the help of game review sites. According to Hackernoon, Ludomotion’s game, “Unexplored”, is such example. The game was reviewed by the well-known website with millions of online followers, PC Gamer. The article was expected to boost Unexplored’s sales given that had nice words about the game, and included the game’s brand new trailer. However, the sales increase that resulted from the review was estimated to be only about 50-70 units.
Rock Paper Shotgun (RPS) writer, who tweeted his admiration about the game, also reviewed Unexplored, but it was even before PC Gamer’s review. What surprised the developers was that Smith concluded his review saying “Unexplored is almost certainly going to be one of my favourite games of the year.” According to Ludomotion, there wasn’t any other coverage of their game except the review from RPS, but the units sold jumped amazingly to 720 units on their 2nd day of launch. Two more articles from RPS and Vice’s Waypoint drove up the game’s sales in May 2017. However, this isn’t a usual case – there are other bigger coverages and reviews which still did not have such effect. For indie game developers, the correlation between game reviews and sales are still hard to determine given the examples above. For Ludomotion, however, they are certain about one thing; and that is “the genuine enthusiasm of the writer” made a meaningful difference in their sales.