are game sales dictated by critics?

I think marketing has the biggest influence, everyone watches TV but i don't think the majority of people read video game magazines.

Two words: Spec Ops.

People will buy games no matter how bad they are, even if the critics back that up.

sales are determined big time by stores

look at State of Emergency the game is crap but because every GS store had to push (by request of higher ups) the game sold phenominally well

If sales were dictated by critics, Super Monaco GP would have sold great.

I know it has been 11.5 years but I still can't get over EGM giving the game 10's.

I'm not big on and reviews and I never was. Even if a game I saw got a perfect score, it wouldn't make me want to buy it, but if I was borderline on comtemplating on wether picking it up or not, then yes it would sway my final decision. The two biggest influences that I think makes a game sell well nowadays is screenshots and word of mouth. I'm more likely to buy a game if a friend gave high praise to a game. I don't think that one magazine can really affect the sales of a certain game, but if a good amount of magazines and websites give praise to a game, then I think it can be done. It's more of an unintentional group effort when it comes to magazines.

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Originally posted by unit003
Now take another game, like Shenmue... it turned out that with the new coming of age in gaming, reviewers were split down the middle on weather to recommend it to players, or to pass it like the plague. That didn't lead to great sales compared to higher standards and alot of it had to do with the reader's source of material, say if it was
EGM they read and there was a negative opinion on it, do you think the person would say he's now willing to buy it? Likely he's not going to becuase of his belief in the view of who he's reading his source material from and that sadly hits a large group of people who don't know enough to take more then just one opinion to get the hint on what they may be passing on. Throw in other games like ecco, wild 9, spawn, thunderforce 5 etc etc...

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Shenmue was one of the best-selling games on DC. It sold over a million copies. Your example makes no sense.

And Ecco (DC) and Spawn blew, and Wild 9 was merely average. Thunderforce 5 could have been pimped by every mainstream magazine in the world and never would have been a best-seller.