In the interest of finding out which sells better gameplay
or story I came across a website called VGChartz. Despite its fairly immature
title it was a gold mine for sales statistics on video games. Looking at the
top 10 bestselling games of all time I was surprised to see that they were all
Nintendo products, which is strange to see seen as Nintendo are widely
considered to be the weakest games company at this moment in time. At the top
we have Wii Sports with 81.94million sales, then Super Mario Bros. at 40.24m,
then Mario Kart Wii at 34.44m and Pokemon Red Green and Blue at 31.37m.
After looking at those figures I began to question the
validity of the website, as I couldn’t find Minecraft in the first 200 games of
the list I looked elsewhere for sales figures. IGN reported on the 3rd
of February 2014 that the Minecraft series’ sales had totalled over 35 million.
I went back onto VGChartz and searched for Minecraft only to find that it only
had the Xbox 360 sales figures, finding this out made me realise that the
website divided up each platform sales for the games. This also explained why
Grand Theft Auto V wasn’t in the top 10 with 32.5 million copies shipped as
reported by IGN.
So this website isn’t perfect, but it’s defiantly one of the
better sites of its type so I will be referencing it with its validity in mind.
So anyways the top 10 of this list consists of gameplay focused games, in fact
the closest story focused game to the top of the list is at number 60 which is
Final Fantasy VII. This undoubtedly tells us that gameplay based games sell
better, even with the website’s uncertainty, the fact that there isn’t a game
anywhere near the top 10 games is enough for me to look past the websites
imperfections.
So there are sales and there’s actual quality of games, just
because a game sells well might not necessarily mean that it’s the best game
ever made, that would be like looking at how many people eat food from
McDonalds and assuming that they sell the best food in the world there. So to
get this information I’m looking for the score from game reviews, and one of
the best ways to look at review scores is to use a website like Metacritic
which gathers review scores from a wide range of sources and works out the
average and presents the information in lists.
Looking at Metacritic I saw that I was right for the most
part to assume that bestselling games aren’t necessarily the highest rated games
seen as Metacritic’s top scored game: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was
in 83rd place on VGChartz’s list. But there were similarities between
the lists, for example the Grand Theft Auto series is high up on the lists on
both websites, the same goes for Mario games. Story focused games had a much
greater presence on Metacritic’s list, but they were still heavily outnumbered
by gameplay focused games like the Grand Theft Auto series and the Tony Hawk’s
series.
To conclude this research it’s clear that gameplay focused
games are by far the most purchased, and they also bare a strong presence on
top rated games list but there are still story games that are up there as
highest rated. For the final part of my personal enquiry I’ll be looking at the
information I’ve gathered here and compare it with my own opinions on this
subject.
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