A qualitative inquiry and a quantitative exploration into the meaning of game reviews

Game journalism has become increasingly important for both consumers and producers of games. Consumers use reviews as a buyers’ guide while publishers use reviews to evaluate their developers. In this article we explore the difficulties game journalists face when writing a review and the effect of these reviews on game sales figures. More specifically, in Study 1 we describe the processes that affect the writing of game reviews based upon interviews with eight prominent game journalists. The results indicate that game journalists need to take into account the highly subjective experience of playing digital games, the rapidly evolving digital game audience, and the strong dependency on the industry. Study 2 complements Study 1 in that we examine whether game journalists influence game sales figures with their writings. Game review scores, advertising efforts and content characteristics were regressed on the official game sales figures in Belgium. The results suggest that review score and advertising eff rts are good predictors of game sales while content characteristics do not influence game sales.