Most video game fans like myself rely on Metacritic to help establish whether a released video game is actually good or not. As I was looking at the latest score for Assassin's Creed II, I got to thinking: "I wonder what the average of the average is for the entire PS3 game collection on Metacritic?" I.e. if we tabulated all the PS3 games on Metacritic and averaged out the Metacritic score of each, what would it be?
I took this idea a little further and broke it out for all the major video game consoles, and compared them. I gathered all the info directly from Metacritic.com (they have full lists of their games and scores), and popped it into Excel. I omitted 2005 because the PS3 and Wii did not have Metacritic numbers posted those years (pre system-release). The results were interesting...
First up, let's look at the the average scores by platform, by year, with the highest scores by platform highlighted in orange.
2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | |
PS3 | 71 | 71.9 | 70 | 71.7 |
360 | 70 | 67 | 66 | 69 |
PSP | 67 | 64 | 67 | 68 |
DS | 62 | 62 | 63 | 67 |
Wii | 63 | 60 | 61 | 65 |
As one can see in the table above, PS3 saw its highest average score back in 2007 and Xbox 360 was even further back in 2006! The PS3 score in 2009 so far (the numbers are only up to November 17, 2009) is only 0.2 points away from 2007, so if they were rounded up, the 2009 score would be the same as 2007, at 72. The PSP, DS and Wii all saw 2009 as being the best year for their respective software, but they trail the 360 and PS3. The delta between the 2009 PS3 and Wii scores is almost 7 points, which may not be surprising considering the different audiences the platforms are geared toward (PS3 is for hardcore gamers and Wii is family-targeted). Here is the graph of the above data:
Now let's check out the average of the averaged averages... i.e. the average of the scores shown above from 2006 to 2009:
Total Average, 2006-2009 | |
|---|---|
PS3 | 71 |
360 | 68 |
PSP | 67 |
DS | 63 |
Wii | 62 |
What the above means is that from 2006-2009, PS3 has the highest-scoring games around - a perhaps a marginal 3 points above 360 but a full 9 points above the Wii. Here's the same data, in handy graph form:
Does this mean PS3 has the best games? Maybe, or maybe not. Differences like the target market I mentioned earlier are a factor to consider. For example, a professional game reviewer may disagree with say, my aunt, on whether a particular title is "good" or not, and the different systems speak to different people. A safe assertion to make is that technically PS3 has the highest-quality core-gamer titles out, but a 3 point difference between PS3 and 360 over 4 year period may not be enough of a difference to really say which system has better games. Additionally, I've maintained that PS3 and 360 appeal to slightly different audiences.
On a personal note, there are stellar games on ALL of the above systems, so it's hard to go wrong (although I am partial to my PS3).
