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While doing some data trawling through GameRankings recently, I ran across a phenomenon on the Wii that I hadn't really seen quantified before.
The average of all Xbox 360 reviews cataloged on GameRankings turns out to be almost 70%. The same number for the PlayStation 3 is over 73% and for the Nintendo Wii ... a dismal 64%. A picture says it best:
Normally, I'd be inclined to dismiss discrepancies in review scores, but a 9-point gap between the PlayStation 3 and the Wii is hard to ignore. Even the Xbox 360 has a nearly 6-point advantage over the Wii. (The standard deviation for these data sets is around 12-14 points, for comparison. However, that alone doesn't tell the whole story. Rather, one should observe that a subset of data -- the roughly 150 Wii games in the whole data set -- has an aggregate review score 6 points below the mean for the entire data set. That is the anomaly.)
While I think that the above data is pretty significant all on its own, I can imagine people raising various objections. For example, the Xbox 360 has been out a year longer than the other two systems, so maybe it has more good games bringing its average up. And the PlayStation 3 has 33% fewer games than the Nintendo Wii, so perhaps a lack of shovelware is keeping the PS3 average higher. If we attempt to level the playing field and only look at the top 10% of all games on each system, the picture evens out a bit for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but the Wii is still significantly behind:
link
The average of all Xbox 360 reviews cataloged on GameRankings turns out to be almost 70%. The same number for the PlayStation 3 is over 73% and for the Nintendo Wii ... a dismal 64%. A picture says it best:
Normally, I'd be inclined to dismiss discrepancies in review scores, but a 9-point gap between the PlayStation 3 and the Wii is hard to ignore. Even the Xbox 360 has a nearly 6-point advantage over the Wii. (The standard deviation for these data sets is around 12-14 points, for comparison. However, that alone doesn't tell the whole story. Rather, one should observe that a subset of data -- the roughly 150 Wii games in the whole data set -- has an aggregate review score 6 points below the mean for the entire data set. That is the anomaly.)
While I think that the above data is pretty significant all on its own, I can imagine people raising various objections. For example, the Xbox 360 has been out a year longer than the other two systems, so maybe it has more good games bringing its average up. And the PlayStation 3 has 33% fewer games than the Nintendo Wii, so perhaps a lack of shovelware is keeping the PS3 average higher. If we attempt to level the playing field and only look at the top 10% of all games on each system, the picture evens out a bit for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but the Wii is still significantly behind:
link