What noise? Are you talking about all the alt-right YouTube channels that keep calling the game woke and trash?

In statistics, we rely a lot on inferential statistics. A big one for us is something called regression analysis. There are many types of regression, but I'll use layman terms here and say that we use it to plot the relationship between a dependent variable and 1+ independent variables. The beauty of a regression is that it tells us the nature of the relationship between each IV and the DV, like gas mileage as the DV and whether or not a car is foreign and weight of the car as IVs - in which case, we do see that for every "unit" increase in weight, gas mileage decreases by x miles per gallon. Nifty little metric, but there are other factors likely at play. Things we cannot control/account for in a model such as driving speed, road quality, and to some extent tire pressure.

When we talk about games, we can say the score is a dependent variable and there are multiple predictor variables we can consider, such as genre familiarity of the reviewers, the quality of the game, replayability, content, studio, etc. In fact, Metacritic makes good use of statistics to establish a pattern, which is used to establish trends and when we have good consistency, we can more accurately attribute predictors to the score. But remember what I said: some things are unrealistic to control for. Things that affect the score that we can't do much about that has nothing to do with game quality. Things like subjectivity, industry dynamics (e.g., zeitgeist), and measurement error.

You know what we call that which affects the score of a game that doesn't have any predictive value but weighs on the score? We call that noise. So what you're really saying is you're fine with listening to the people who see that the game is scoring well and still said "I don't care, I just don't like it because I don't like it", you're giving outsized priority to the people who believe the game came out "at the wrong time", and willfully fine with agreeing with low reviews where their metric systems are problematic.

I have no dog in this race, but when you say you'll listen to the noise, that sounds wild to me.

Will you trust the noice if it say jump of the 30th floor with me.
JUMP NOW

It's wild to me how many here are willing to shill for games journalists apparently. People that give skewed reviews not because a game is good, but because it aligns with their beliefs. If that's their idea of being worthy of an upvote then please, vote me down.

I mean the only reason MLB was the best selling title was because it was multi-platform. Likewise with Marathon. Will ring true for MS games. Only Nintendo titles are truly flexing their muscles when they chart as they are only to be found there.

It's kinda funny how this Obscure guy lives rent-free in your head. lol

Does Phil also live there?

you know when you hit caps lock you can turn it off before finishing a word right?
it's not a commitment

I really doubt that. I see it getting more and more traction.

by the end of the year? probably sooner than that