Thursday 9 December 2010

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few Even If The Box Hasn't Been Delivered Yet

Never mind Metacritic, Game Rankings or other review aggregation sites, there’s only one source I ever use for judging the quality of games: the customer reviews at Amazon.co.uk. Where else can you find real truth and hyperbole-free revelations like Mass Effect 2 suffering from “…the kind of incompetence you expect from 3 people in a basement making an iPod game”?

I’m therefore in some sort of a quandary over Cataclysm. It seems there’s been a bit of a problem with the despatch or delivery (or both), leading to many Amazon customers still not having received their pre-ordered boxes, so I don’t know whether to believe the (to date) 46 one star reviews like “Very Poor Service”, “Pathetic amazon”, “Amazon can’t deliver squat” (mostly saying it would probably be a good game if it ever gets delivered), or the 36 five star reviews like “Shame on you Amazon”, “Never again Amazon”, “Amazon fail” (who are absolutely adamant that it is an excellent game, despite not actually having access to it thanks to the lack of delivery).

Fortunately m’colleague also ordered from Amazon, and is therefore in a position to deliver the definitive review: “7/10 Best game I haven’t played this year!”

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