Over at Pocket Gamer, they recently ran a feature, looking at the review scores of western-developed titles compared to those that originated in Japan. Guess what? The Japanese games scored better. Le gasp! But, in all honesty, Japan has been producing better games for the DS and maybe a lot of that is a genuine interest in the handheld's capabilities and not so much financially-driven like so many movie tie-in titles and the like developers in other regions are putting out for the console.
All in all, it's a very good read and worthy of your time.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-15-2007 @ 11:38AM
furyoo said...
That's a very misleading graphic. We have to bear in mind the number of games from each region.
And with that comes the problem of confidence interval. A larger sample size for the Japanese game review scores will mean that the mean score tend towards the "true" mean of the games from Japan, whilst the smaller sample size for games coming from the rest of the world would mean that the number 58 has a lower significance level and hence has a high probability of actually having a "true" mean of 63 as well.
I guess you need to know statistics to know what I just said.
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3-15-2007 @ 3:55PM
Bridget said...
That is a good article. I don't know much about statistics, but I still found it quite interesting and true.
It seems to me that most western developers seem to think that all DS owners are between the ages of 8 and 12. That's how they get by revamping stale genres and banking on movie and T.V. licenses to maintain sales.
I'm a 33-year-old woman and I love my DS! However, I'm usually disappointed when I scan the game titles available for the DS. I wish there were more games oriented towards adults for the DS, or at the very least more Japanese games ported over to the U.S. that stay true to the original games.
And no, I have no interest in playing "Over the Hedge: Hammy Goes Nuts."
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3-16-2007 @ 1:13PM
Steve 3.2 said...
Numbers are like people, torture them enough and you can get them to say anything.
This sampling is not accurate because the source data (metacritic) mainly focuses on titles released in the US. There are many bad Japanese games that stay in Japan and will never show up on the metacritic pages. But it's interesting that Nintendo leads the way. Someone needs to do developer and publisher breakdowns to study those averages further.
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