Best. Month. Evar?

First of all, thanks to Next Gen for taking the time to do this analysis.  It’s definitely interesting data.

That being said, I think that Next Gen is really missing the mark.  The problem is that they are, basically, trying to answer the question of "what was the best month ever for video games," based on the average Metacritic rating for all games released in a given month.

This is a horribly flawed metric for answering this question.  NO gamer plays ALL of the games that come out in a given month.  What gamers are saying, when the wax poetic about the 2007 holiday lineup, is that there was an embarrassment of riches in the form of an unusually large number of very highly-rated games released during that period.

Who cares that there may have been several dozen shovel-ware stinkers pushed out the door to capitalize on the growing casual market and the holiday gift-buying bonanza?  What gamers are acknowledging is that there were more great games being released than they could keep up with leading up to Christmas 2007 (that number simply doesn’t have to be very high).

So, I would encourage Next Gen to re-analyze the data from a different perspective: what is the total number of titles released, in each of the months that they studied, that averaged a review score of 85+?  I would wager that this will yield a very different picture, but I would love to see the actual data…