Imagine for a second that at a population level, the average difference between a game’s MetaScore on any two consoles is indeed zero. If we’re trying to demonstrate that there’s a significant difference between a game’s MetaScore on one console versus another, then we need to reject the hypothesis that there is zero difference between them.Ī slightly subtle point that will help inform how we proceed - although we have scraped the whole of MetaCritic, we are still dealing with a sample of games, and not a population (if nothing else, there were games without MetaScores that we excluded from our analysis, so by definition we are working with a subset of all the games available on both consoles). All things considered, can we conclude that the average difference between platforms is significant? This sounds a lot like grounds for a hypothesis test, so let’s think about what such a test might look like. Having said that, the difference seems small (just over 1 point on average), and the range is quite wide either side of the mean. We can see that games available on both platforms have, on average, very slightly higher MetaScores on XBox One compared to PS4.

The dataset we use for this analysis is thus generated by scraping the MetaCritic website (this process was covered in depth in a previous blog). As a reminder, the MetaScore is a weighted average of all available critic scores for a given title, with extra weight given to certain reviewers “based on quality and overall stature”. In particular, we will lean on a game’s ‘ MetaCritic score’ as a measure of its ‘intrinsic quality’. Overcoming subjectivity is something I attempted before when delving into the murky world of album reviews, and it’s a trick that will be repeated here.

But how can we judge the quality of a game? As the phrase so nearly goes: one man’s trash is another man’s Call of Duty.

Of course, these statistics are of little consequence to consumers, who are, we can only assume, concerned less with a console’s commercial performance than they are with the quality of games that they can play on it. Sony can certainly claim the crown fo r units shifted, having sold over 110m PS4s since its launch in 2013 (the XBox One is estimated to have sold a disappointing 47m units in the same timeframe, and the Switch 55m since its more recent 2017 release). As Sony prepares to launch the PS5, Microsoft brainstorms more ways to include the letter ‘X’ in the name of its next console, and Nintendo does whatever it is that Nintendo does at the weekends, it’s a good time to look back at the eighth generation of video game consoles, and decide which of them, if any, could be described as ‘the best’.

Ps4 vs ps4 s