BriceMorrison.com Life is a Game

Metacritic is considered the industry standard for game ratings, and rightly so.  By aggregating the opinions and evaluations of well informed and well versed game reviewers, Metacritic is a fairly accurate evaluation of the quality of a video game.  Large and small development companies alike seek to achieve a high Metacritic score, which is understood to have a high correlation with sales.  Extremely high scores in the high 80’s or 90’s also often result in a great deal of respect and admiration for the developer, which can only help them.  As in any entertainment industry, the opinions of the critics, the ones who know the playing field, matter to the rest of us.

Of course, a strong Metacritic score is only part of the equation leading to seven-digit sales figures.  Other factors such as marketing and promotion, hitting the right target audience, and a proper launch date all significantly impact sales on top of the quality of the game itself.  Psychonauts, released in 2005 with a highly favoriable Metacritic score of 88/100, has essentially become the poster child for a great game that, for one reason or another, failed to perform at retail.  However, cases such as Psychonauts, though unfortunate, are rare and are not enough to bring into question the validity of a Metacritic score’s accuracy.  In assessing the quality of a title relative to others in the industry, Metacritic is almost always spot on.  Until recently, everyone has agreed that the system works well enough.

But what happens when instead of being spot on, the gaming press appears to have a blind spot?  What happens with poorly or mediocre rated games go on to break multiplatinum sales records?  What happens when Metacritic is consistently wrong?

Nintendo, a company who is simultaneously becoming the hero and the villain of the games industry, has an unusual correlation between their game sales and their Metacritic scores.  While normally a decent Metacritic score is prerequisite to blockbuster sales, many of Nintendo’s most successful titles receive only mediocre scores.  In general, sales begin to dip off substantially after going below 70; games with less than decent quality tend to not fair well with customers.

However, Nintendo seems to be immune to poor Metacritic scores.  Consider the following sales data from a small sampling of games that all scored in the 60’s (Nintendo’s titles in red):

[Sales data taken from VGChartz.com]

For some reason, Nintendo’s titles are able to perform extremely well regardless of poor reviewer reception.  Moving both up and down the charts shows the same kind of distribution.

What’s going on?

Blue Ocean Strategy Defined

Nintendo has consistently mentioned the phrase  “Blue Ocean Strategy” in numerous press conferences.  Taken from the Harvard Business Review book of the same name, Blue Ocean Strategy is a method of competition that seeks to find profits in a cluttered market by expanding to non-consumers.  In doing so, a company who successful executes the Blue Ocean Strategy will expand the market and, relevant to this discussion, change the values by which their product is defined.

Thus by definition, a Blue Ocean Strategy fundamentally changes the playing field.  By seeking out non-consumers of a product, the company must alter the weight given to traditional values within an industry while simultaneously adding new values which attract new consumers.  Since new customers won’t have the slightest idea what the traditional quality metrics are, it makes no sense to rack up expenses keeping them up to par.  Instead, they focus on the new values while letting the old values decay to mediocrity.

So what does that all mean?  Simply put, the old methods of evaluating video games mean nothing to the non-gamers who purchase Nintendo’s products.  And Nintendo understands this, so they don’t waste money trying to compete on those terms.  Instead, they make games for a different purpose, one that appeals to non-gamers.

Competing on Different Values

To understand what Nintendo is doing, it’s important to first understand the playing field as it originally was.  A summary of the explicit rating categories of the major gaming review sites leaves us with three main product values.  The first is Graphics and Sound Quality, or how good the game looks and sounds.  Can you see the sweat dripping down Kobe Bryant’s nose?  Does it have an artistic twang to it?  These are the marks of a high Graphic and Sound Quality score.

The second broad value is the Concept or Design, which is whether the game provides a unique or original gameplay experience, be it in creating its own genre or innovating in another.  Generally speaking, limited innovation is rewarded, as is intelligent evolution of a loved genre.

The final industry value is Length of Gameplay, which is exactly how many hours of fun the player can expect to get out of a game.  This is also sometimes referred to within the term Replay Value.

While the terms and breakdown differ from site to site, these are the general strokes that hardcore gamers and the gaming press look at to determine the quality of any given title.  To Microsoft, and Sony, and other developers, that value canvas is everything.  Graphics and sound, concept, and time define the box within which classic game companies must develop their content.

The Larger Picture

For Nintendo’s titles, however, that’s only part of the picture.  While they also incorporate Graphics, Concept, and Playtime into their development, the importance of these values is purposely reduced.  According to their strategy, Nintendo has added two new values which were never present in games before.  The purpose of these values is to attract new customers who wouldn’t be playing games otherwise.

The first broad value is Accessability.  While this value may have had glimpses in some reviews of the past, calling out games that were “easy to learn but hard to master”, Nintendo has taken the term to a whole new level.  Its products strip away the years of gameplay experience required by most titles and instead provide an interface that everyone from little Timmy to Grandma can jump into.  This is done by more than just the Wii Remote, but is also reinforced by simplified game design, positive encouragement, and familiar content such as real life sports or activities that any player would already understand.

The second new value is Peripheral Benefit, or the idea that the player will actually enrich their life via playing the game.  Thought possibly more perceived than factual, players of Nintendo’s games desire more than entertainment.  They want to engage in media that better their health, their skills, their talents, and their lives.

To consumers who would certainly not call themselves gamers, Nintendo’s mid-scoring games are, in fact, the only games that attract them.

These two values are at the heart of Nintendo’s breakaway software success.  But because these are disruptive values that are not within the traditional games industry, they do not show up on Metacritic when they are first released.  The gaming press does not have accessability or peripheral benefit on their radar.  Thus, when we look at the Metacritic scores of Nintendo’s products of this type, they are inaccurate to assess the perceived quality of the title.  When Metacritic looks at Big Brain Academy, it scores low, because it is low on the traditional values of the games industry.  But when non-gamers look at the same title, they see a product of great quality.

Note that not all of Nintendo’s successful titles appeal to accessibility and peripheral benefit.  Super Mario Galaxy makes no attempt at enriching the player’s life beyond entertainment, nor does Donkey Kong Barrel Blast, which scored a dismal 46 on Metacritic.  However, these titles still benefit from the incredible momentum and brand recognition that comes from their other titles.

“I should point out this isn’t a game.”

The quote above, taken from IGN’s an review of Personal Trainer: Cooking, is exemplary of the changes that are occuring behind the most popular review sites and magazines.  Reviewers whose evaluations end up on Metacritic look at games from the traditional view and by traditional values.  They aren’t yet trained to understand or even recognize the two new values that Nintendo’s titles introduce.  Asking a game journalist to review Personal Trainer: Cooking or Wii Fit is like asking a movie critic to review a Tae-Bo exercise video.  Imagine the review: “There’s no plot or character development.”  “The camera work and cinematography is shoddy.”  “The setting and the stage is inadequate.”  They will be completely missing the point.

However, this will not be the case forever.  As Nintendo and other companies continue to cash in on games that score high with peripheral benefit and accessibility, Metacritic will calibrate itself to accomodate these new values and, in time, adopt the values that Nintendo has created.  When games with these new values were originally released, Metacritic reviewers had no frame of reference, and so, not knowing what to do, they assumed that it must be average.  No matter how good the game is, since the gaming press was incapable of understanding the new values, they gave it an average review in the 60’s range.

To illustrate this, take for example the interesting case of Personal Trainer: Cooking.  This title scored an 81, which is generally favorable and will often help the sales of a game.  Yet it is nothing like a traditional game, it is more like an interactive cookbook.  So why was this title, high on accessibility and peripheral benefit, able to score so highly?

The answer is found one month before Personal Trainer: Cooking was released; there was another interactive cookbook that had been released, called What’s Cooking? with Jamie Oliver.  What’s Cooking received a 49 Metacritic score, meaning that all of the reviews were generally negative.  It was a disaster on all counts.

Thus, after calibrating to understand what a bad interactive cookbook looks like, Metacritic was then capable to give out a high score to a good interactive cookbook.  In the same way that two points are needed on a graph to determine position, the two games were required to help reviewers understand exactly what it was they were reviewing.  If the order of the games’ release dates were reversed, then it’s highly likely that Personal Trainer: Cooking would have ended up in the 60’s or low 70’s range along with the other peripheral benefit games.

It’s unlikely that the explicit metrics of evaluation will change, since they are so deeply entrenched in gaming culture.  But as Nintendo continues to draw in consumers who would never call themselves “gamers”, the reviews of peripheral-benefit games will slowly grow more accurate and relevant.