There was a long discussion recently on this blog about whether game companies that pay some publication or YouTuber to report about their game would expect that this coverage was positive, basically buying a good review. I think the discussion somewhat mixed up two very different cases, which I would like to separate:

One case is big, triple-A games. This is really big business, and those games not only cost millions to make, they also have an advertising budget of millions. Gaming is now sufficiently mainstream that you can find huge ads for a game on New York's Times Square or painted all over a bus, and not just in specialized gaming publications. Which means that the game company can assume everybody has heard about the game in question, and then it becomes a problem of persuading people to choose this particular game among a large range of other choices. For triple-A games, review scores are important, and there is an interest in promoting positive coverage and in some cases even trying to suppress negative coverage.

The other case is everybody else, the much larger number of much smaller games. That can be established game studios bringing out yet another medium-budget game of a series, or indie studios launching a completely new game. In that case while of course a high review score on Metacritic is nice, the primary problem is that most potential customers haven't even heard of the game and are unaware that the game exists. Paying $20,000 to $30,000 to a YouTuber with several million of followers is not primarily about positive coverage, it is about coverage, period.

That is especially noticeable when the developers make a deliberately controversial game, like the JFK shooting simulator or Hatred. In such a case the hope is that negative coverage is better than no coverage at all. Hatred ended up getting a Metacritic score of 42 not because it was controversial, but because it was simple a rather bad and boring shooter game. Without the controversy, nobody would have even noticed the game. They'd rather have somebody like TotalBiscuit condemning their game in front of 2 million viewers instead of him not talking about the game at all.

From my point of view as a consumer, I can see the problem. I went from not being able to play all the games in my Steam library to not even being aware any more of every major PC video game release. Especially as I like games like turn-based tactical or strategy games, which aren't often the kind that get advertising at a bus stop. And while it's already bad on the PC, I am completely lost regarding iPad games, where I play a more or less random selection and have no idea which are the best games on the platform. It doesn't help that if you google for the "top 10 best iOS games" and look up 10 different sources, you'll get 100 different games with no game mentioned twice.

The more games we get, and that appears to be a rising flood, the more important simple awareness becomes. If millions of people are aware that a game exists, chances are that some among them decide to buy the game because of their specific niche interest, even if the game doesn't have a great review score. I bet among the games you are currently playing there are a few which have a not so good review score on Metacritic, but you like them anyway. And that problem of awareness means advertising that rather targets basic visibility than great praise.