The internet has been lit up lately by a bunch of people posting their opinions about video games. Actually, I guess it’s that way all the time, but lately the specific question being asked is: ‘does quality matter?‘. As next gen prices rise and making a profit gets harder, developers and their marketing departments are often of conflicting opinions when it comes to how much quality can be allowed to degrade before it affects sales. The debate has been particularly lively in the last few months because the Wii is selling much better than most people anticipated.

So in my latest feature, When Pundits Attack, I tried to add something to the conversation that is based on hard market data. This article has a lot of graphs and almost nothing about horror games, so if you are only interested in exploding zombie heads you might want to skip it. If you follow this kind of stuff, however, it might be a little more interesting.