Quality matters in video games, especially shooters

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With consumers feeling the pinch in their pocketbooks, this holiday season may turn out to be more cutthroat than usual for the hundreds of video games set to hit store shelves.

Analysts predict that only top-tier titles and those that are highly rated by critics will thrive as consumers pare down spending in the fourth quarter, when the game industry typically pulls in 40% of its annual revenue.

This will be particularly true of shooter games. The genre is highly sensitive to quality rankings doled out by reviewers, generally on a scale of 0 to 100.

‘It is pretty detrimental to sales for a shooter game to achieve a score below 80%,’ said Jesse Divnich, director of analytical services at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research in San Diego. ‘Simply put, if you want to make a first-person shooter, aim to achieve quality scores above 80%. If not, don’t even bother.’

This is the conclusion Electronic Arts came to earlier this week when it pulled the plug on Tiberium, a science-fiction shooter game that had been several years in development. The chart below shows just how brutal buyers can be when it comes to low scores. Add the current economic fear factor and the pressure becomes even greater.

-- Alex Pham

Chart by Electronic Entertainment Design and Research