Totally true. While I read any review I can on most games and talk to friends, I think most people believe many of the reviews are biased in one form or another.

I can see why. Game reviews are bought and traded with ad dollars. People I know are a much better indication of whether or not I will like something than the marketing engine that is 'reviews' and advertising.

Does Retail mean they just happened to find it on a shelf? or that they could find it on the shelves when they were already looking for it?

Nice to see online demo's on there. I definitely use that for determining what I will and won't buy, or at least help prioritize out the list of what is next up to play.

I agree. I personally (along with most other Gamasutra readers) would consider myself among that 21%. Just this month I've probably made over 20 gaming reccommendations to friends and family members who take my opinion seriously. Even with my own gaming obsession, I still have peers who's opinion I trust over any review or marketing ploy.

I wonder: does "word of mouth" mean only personal, real-time conversations with actual friends?

Or does it include unsolicited comments by random people on game-specific discussion forums?

I ask because while I do tend to trust the advice of gamers I know personally, I'm also inclined to consider seriously the comments I read on a discussion forum about a game.

That doesn't mean I uncritically accept everything that anyone says, or that I'm just counting up "love it" vs. "hate it" numbers. It means that if I read a lot of thoughtful comments that tend to come down positively or negatively about some game, I'm liable to give those comments considerable weight.

If these two information sources -- discussion forum comments versus in-person comments from friends -- aren't broken out separately, the results might be interesting if they were.

Didn't we already know it without a study?

I always buy games that I know -I'll- like. In that way I'm selfish.
No MW2 for me, even though all my friends have it,
I'd rather have Demon's Souls and other such Dark Horses.

While the results of the survey seem obvious, it's also important to keep in mind that what people *say* their reasons are and what their reasons *actually* are can be very different. I mean, the truth is that people simply aren't going to say "I bought that game because the advertising worked on me", even though that is the reason in a lot of cases.

Also, even if word of mouth is ultimately the most important factor for many people, at some level there are people who decided to try a game out for another reason - advertising or reviews, most likely - and those people are extremely important to developers, because without them the game would never reach the point where word of mouth matterred. Ultimately, word of mouth can't happen unless people find out about something to begin with, and in that sense things like reviews and advertisements are indispensible.

I agree with Adam's point about advertising having more influence than it appears to, and also getting the word of moth started. But, like he says, word of mouth is still a huge factor. I predict advertising agencies jumping on the idea. Expect even more paid forum-posters and commenters now.

Indeed we did know this before the study, however, the study helps put it in a more-organized and ranked perspective. Personally, I find reviews to be almost as influential on my own purchases as much as word of mouth is. Though some may believe rieviews are biased, most of the time the people reviewing the games are fellow gamers; so again, reviews are almost like a vicarious form of word of mouth to me.

"[T]he least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better."

So what does that imply about the "hit" level of success that games like World of Warcraft or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 have enjoyed?

I've had a theory for a while now that neither gameplay features nor polish nor relatively low system requirements are sufficient to explain WoW's unique success, but that -- like most hits -- WoW is popular simply because it came to be perceived as popular. That lightning might have struck any game that accomplished the basics as well as WoW did; it merely happened to have hit Blizzard's game. The same applies to CoD:MW2.

If that's basically true, then the lesson for game designers is that you can't expect to replicate the hit effect for your own product by copying features of a hit product. Your game will not become massively popular because you copied this or that gameplay mechanic from WoW or CoD:MW2, any more than novelists can expect to become the next J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown because they write about wizard schools or religious mysteries.

If there's any formula for achieving massive levels of popularity, I suspect it might be something like this: keep it simple enough for the masses to understand it, make it big/long to give the appearance of depth, have one "hook" that allows people to quickly describe it to friends, have one minor news-worthy controversy about its content that brings it to the attention of the general population... and then cross your fingers and hope that people start talking about it.

Perhaps we could call it the "mass effect"....