there is something of a scurge in the market that is gaming and I'm willing to name it upon the reviewer of the more popular media by saying that their opinions reflect too great an influence upon gamers, thus leading to the possibility of how certain game titles fare in the industry.
Why am I saying this? Well, let's take a game like chrono trigger. It was without a doubt a new step in gameplay for RPG's in a time when dragon warrior and final fantasy were the so called "be all, end all" of RPG's. It was given high marks and grades along with great number of opinions telling of how great it is and so and so. 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...

so what do you think? are they controlling the content for what could be a good game? or do you think that sales are still well-deserved depending on how the game goes over with the public?