Analyst Admits It: Review Scores Don't Affect Sales

Call of Duty: Ghosts has been receiving some pretty average review scores. We're betting this won't affect its sales. Apparently we're not alone.

First up, Ghost's Metascore sits between 74-78 across all platforms, whereas last year's Black Ops 2 is 74-83. So let's turn to Cowen & Company analyst Doug Creutz - a respected voice in the investor world when it comes to the performance of video games companies in terms of returns on investment - for his take in this. He basically says what most people think anyway:

"By and large, most titles' commercial fates are decided well before the first review comes out; otherwise, we would not be able to use pre-launch data from Amazon and predict actual sales with a fair degree of accuracy," says Creutz as reported by CVG.

Basically, he has a point. The weight of marketing spend thrown behind games such as GTA, Assassin's Creed, Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty on mainstream websites, TV, mainstream media and large game sites not to worried about editorial independence inevitably results in non-gamers buy titles.

It's this non-gamer market that doesn't read review scores that makes the big difference. So you have to ask why the games companies themselves are forever quoting Meta-Scores to investors when those scores come in around the 90 mark.

Oh, no you don't...