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EA Casual and the Problem with Reviews |
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“They’re not swayed by a low score on IGN or a low score out of one of
these gaming sites,” she continues. “It’s a little bit amusing, in that
it’s people reviewing games against measures that are important to core
gamers yet are not important to casual gamers.”
There’s a
long-running and rather pointless debate about the correlation between
videogame reviews and sales. The fact is that they do and they don’t
matter. It all depends.
Reviews are more likely to impact sales
for a hardcore strategy title, for instance, as the genre’s audience is
inherently more dedicated to gaming and is more susceptible to falling
under the hypnotic spell of critics' comments, which help validate a
purchase.
The average buyer of Take-Two’s dismally-reviewed $40
Carnival Games for Wii, however, isn’t going to be visiting Metacritic
to find out if the Dunk Tank mini-game compares favorably against the
aiming mechanics of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
Carnival Games,
with its 56 percent review average, managed to be the
fourth-best-selling title on Wii in the US during September behind
games like Metroid Prime 3, selling over 200,000 units. So Vrabeck
would appear to have a point about specialist game reviews. Casual
gamers "don't read those things."
While Vrabeck calls the
supposed mismatch of traditional consumer gaming sites and casual games
“amusing,” in the same breath she admits that casual game reviews are
“a huge issue in the press and in the industry.” So, to an extent
anyhow, specialist reviews really do matter to EA Casual. And as the
casual division inherently needs to be everything to everyone, whether
they be middle-aged women, older men, kids, teens and ‘tweens, finding
review venues “appropriate” for the target audience isn’t an easy task.
“The
concept of a one-size-fits-all evaluation tool isn’t as relevant,”
argues EA Casual marketing VP Russell Arons, who used to head up the
$1.5 billion Barbie toy business. “…The measurement [of a game’s
appeal] for women aged 25 to 34 would more likely be whether or not
they’d hang up on their girlfriend to play this game. ‘Would you hang
up a phone conversation for this game?’ That’d probably be a truer
measure for that target audience.”
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