Analyst firm Cowen and Company has released more results from its Fall 2009 Video Game Survey, this time to highlight what factors drive game purchase decisions. The results are reported in Edge-Online.
The firm conducted a survey of 1,312 people in addition to 1,013 individuals specified as game players. Among other questions, it asked what drives people’s decisions in choosing games to buy. Doug Creutz of Cowen and Company says despite the focus by publishers and developers on delivering high scores at review, critical reviews and aggregated scores such as those compiled by Metacritic were cited as the two least important factors. The findings mirror recent analysis by EEDAR that found marketing can have a much bigger impact on game sales than game quality.
In order of priority, respondents to Cowen’s survey listed decision drivers as genre, perception of earlier games in a series, price, word-of-mouth, impressions of the game culled from exposure to editorial or advertising, and perception of the publisher s earlier titles. Creutz says reviews could play a factor in word of mouth and therefore play a more important role. However he added that game makers jawboning reviewers for higher scores should instead focus their time on development.
Read more at Edge-Online {link no longer active}.
