Peter Moore: Metacritic is Irrelevant to the Wii

EA Sports President Peter Moore, hot shot of the games world (until we find a better nickname for him), has helped his team find their stride on the Wii. According to recent reports by VGChartz, EA Sports Active has found its way into over 800,000 homes, while maintaining a solid 82% on Metacritic.

But Metacritic is exactly what Peter Moore seems to be pointing out here.  Actually, he's pointing out how much it isn't impacting on the retail side of the industry.

With high-selling, yet middling games like the infamous Carnival Games selling over 3 million copies while building a Metacritic reputation of 56%, Moore may be right in seeing a sort of disconnect between reviews and sales.  For some of these Wii games that target the wide audience the Wii has, Moore thinks Metacritic needn't be their focus.  He says:

"I absolutely guarantee you, the thing we're watching most closely now is things like Amazon - and I'll go look at women's magazines that have powerful websites, and then we look at what we call 'mommy bloggers'. That's where those people go for their information. They are not going to Metacritic. They don't know Metacritic exists."

As we noted, this approach seems to work with some games, like EA Sports Active. But isn't this just a shift in marketing, and dealing less with the games press?  Well, Moore isn't treading lightly there, either:

"The thing is with the Wii, it seems to be for the gaming sites, it's the last platform they review. It takes a time to get an actual review score. I would pretty much guarantee that just about every Wii game ships without a Metacritic rating because [reviewers] haven't got around to it or they're not interested in reviewing it."

Truly, then, reviewers know their own demographic.  Top gaming sites often have "core gamers" as readers.  But Moore seems to be missing some ingredients here. Core games still exist on the Wii and will for some time, like EA's own Dead Space Extraction, or The Conduit, which is set to release in the upcoming weeks.

While EA Sports Active has garnered attention for commercials during Jon & Kate Plus 8, SEGA is working to market The Conduit in a similar way for core gamers, with a slew of magazine spots and commercials as well.  Those same gamers are more likely to read reviews on the games, so it seems to balance out (as long as sales actually reflect this).

Bottom line: go buy these core Wii games and stick it to "the Moore."  Speaking of games for everyone, why not take another peek at our review of Boom Blox Bash Party?

Source: Eurogamer