number-crunching
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Report picks apart relationship between Metacritic and Steam sales
Ars Technica has released a new installment of their Steam Gauge project, where the website analyzes Valve's digital distribution service and its impact on the games industry. This time, they've explored the connection (or possible lack thereof) between Metacritic scores and number of sales on Steam. Do higher Metacritic scores correspond to a higher number of Steam sales? Unfortunately, the answer isn't as simple as a "yes" or "no." Initially, things look disjointed. Ars notes that "a game with an 80 on Metacritic ... is just as likely to bring in about 56,000 estimated Steam sales (at the 25th percentile) as it is to earn 375,000 estimated Steam sales (at the 75th percentile)." However, looking at the median sales and aggregating Metacritic scores into 10-point ranges, a more identifiable trend emerges. According to Ars' estimates, a game with a median Metacritic score of 90 or higher will sell 50 times the amount of copies that a game with a Metacritic of 30 or lower sells. Some caveats: Ars Technica's data represents estimates based on publicly-available information, and Metacritic itself weighs reviews from different sites differently. One man's trash may be another man's treasure, but Metacritic may be inclined to agree with one side more than the other. Also, the data analyzed doesn't take into account discount events such as the Steam sales - which we all know are the bank account's natural enemy - so there are additional factors that could be at play here. Lastly, Ars notes that individual games may buck the trend: Orion: Dino Horde has a Metacritic rating of 36, yet an estimated 314,000 Steam sales, while NBA 2K13, despite its rating of 90 on Metacritic, has only sold an estimated 50,000 copies on Steam. Nonetheless, there appears to be some sort of correlation between higher Metacritic ratings and higher sales on Steam. Causation, though? Maybe not so much. And while this information might seem like common sense, now there are numbers to back up your intuitions. [Image: Metacritic]
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: All the community news that's fit to print
In a city marked by constant alien invasions, assaults from an island controlled by a sadistic villain, rampant street crime, and various technological and magical disasters, there's always something to talk about. There's usually more than a few things for players to talk about on top of that, which certainly helps keep our interest in City of Heroes even when we're not right in the thick of things. After all, whatever else you might say about the game and its flaws -- it's fun. It gives you a fun ride of being a superhero or supervillain. If you can't enjoy a conversation about that, really, you're just plain getting jaded. Naturally, having discussions about nothing more than "it's fun" would get a little old, but that's certainly not all of the discussions about the game. Just about half. Today, we're taking a look at some of the other half, spotlighting some of the most interesting, though-provoking, or just plain funny discussions and threads coming out of the City of Heroes community.
Aion live server numbers crunched
Aion has been out for roughly 6 weeks so we thought it might be fun to crunch some of the numbers NCsoft provides on their official North American website. We've taken a look at realm balance, class balance, and what level Aion's population is at. Data collection occurred on November 12 at noon Eastern. A spreadsheet containing all data can be viewed here. Realm population balance (Elyos vs. Asmodian) Realm population balance is 50/50 on 3 of 14 servers. The remaining 11 servers have the Asmodians ahead of the Elyos by a 51:49 ratio. It appears as if NCsoft's forced realm population balance mechanic is keeping things under control, but one wonders how rampant these disparities would be if character creation was unrestricted. We've seen unbalanced two-faction MMOs before. It should be stated that these numbers only represent a tally of Elyos and Asmodians across all servers and not how organized or active each realm is in PvPvE.
