Battlefield 3 Developer Talks About Game Quality, Review Scores, and Sales

Battlefield 3 is being released this week all over the world, so the executive producer of the first person shooter, Patrick Bach, talked about review scores and how they relate to actual sales, as good ratings aren't necessarily a guarantee that a game will be profitable.

Electronic Arts and DICE have invested heavily in Battlefield 3, coming up with an all-new engine, Frostbite 2, and promoting it through a variety of ways, effectively flooding the the web with massive ads, lots of videos and a variety of screenshots.

Now, as the game is being rolled out and reviews are coming in, Patrick Bach talked to Eurogamer about review scores and how they're mostly the only valid feedback given to a game at least right after its launch.

"We care a lot," Bach said about review scores. "You could argue that reviews are the most objective feedback you can get as a game developer. The other thing you have is consumer feedback, as in forum posts. You can't use that because it's mostly people being very upset with stuff. It's not very often you have a thread on how awesome something is. Well you get that sometimes with videos and stuff, but general threads are mostly complaints. Then you have the sales."

He then emphasized that, while DICE has a Metacritic target score for Battlefield 3, reaching it doesn't guarantee great sales, especially given the state of the gaming market right now.

"You can argue that game quality has to do with sales, but it's not equal. You have to have enough game to reach sales. But it doesn't mean if you have a 95 rated game that would sell the most copies. An 85 rated game could sell way more copies than a 95 rated game, which is sad for the developer, because the developer then gets a receipt on that: you made a great game, and then the sales tell you that you didn't make a great game. So it's hard for a developer to be judged by anything but reviews."

Bach didn't say what score DICE was aiming for, but, judging from the impressive reviews that appeared in advance, Battlefield 3 most definitely reached it.