Trends of launch game review scores across generations
It can be really interesting to look through a bunch of well-organized data even (especially) if there are no easy conclusions to be drawn from it. Gamasutra's gathering of historical Metacritic/Gamerankings review data for home console launch games is just such a collection of interesting, difficult to interpret numbers.
Aggregated looks at review scores for the launches of systems from the PlayStation to the Wii U show that the PS3, Wii, and Wii U's launch games had the widest spread of review scores – a phenomenon we might attribute to the larger number of reviewing press outlets that were present for those launches.
The average review score was highest for GameCube, and lowest for PlayStation. And surprisingly, the Wii U has almost as many US launch games as the most populated platform, the PS2. That's at least one auspicious statistic for the Wii U's launch lineup, even if many of the games in it are ports.
