After compiling data from more than 20 ‘œfirst’ or ‘œexclusive’ reviews, I have found that the final score given is 6% higher than average. Even when the extremely off-centre reviews are removed, and the average score of each publication is accounted for, there remains more than a 4.5% discrepancy.

In the data shown below I have tried to find as many ‘œfirst’ reviews as possible from recent years (something, as best I could find, hasn’t been done before). Obviously I can’t find them all, and equally obviously I am no master statistician. However, the results speak for themselves. If you just take the scores given and subtract the average score that game got, you find the early reviews score an average of 5.88% higher.

Removing Mario Party 8s review (which was given an almost 30% higher-than-average review from GamePro) the average increase remains at just under 5%. Unsatisfied it was this easy, my next step was to factor in if these publications generally reviewed games higher.

If OXM scored games much higher on average, it would explain their high exclusive review scores. Subtracting the average difference makes a surprisingly small difference. The bias, and I hesitate to use that word, remains just under 5%.

Clearly we’re not dealing with any bank-breakingly corrupt pay-offs. If corruption was half as rampant as many like to think, I have a feeling the difference would be much higher. It still can’t be ignored. Almost universally the first review, being billed as ‘œexclusive’ or otherwise, is higher.

It could be small scale shady dealings. You give me 3 points more and we’ll pay for advertising. But I feel, perhaps a touch naively, it’s much simpler. From talking to people and from my own experience, if you are writing the exclusive first review of a game you are going to having a rather unique experience. You do not have anybody else’s experiences or thoughts to look at or bounce your own off. You miss out on other people’s complaints and criticisms of things that you don’t notice. You also get a much fresher experience, untainted by reading a thousand other reviews telling you every detail you wish you could find out for yourself.

No matter how good of an explanation that may be, it’s not excusable. People turn to reviews for guidance. If you are reviewing a game and aren’t finding all the bugs and niggling flaws others find, are you doing a fair job? The debate surrounding this could go on for a while, so I’ll not go on about it more here.

The data I’ve compiled is available for your downloading pleasure here (in Open Office Calc format) and you are very welcome to rip it apart, build on it and/or fix errors. There’s much more that could be done (Is there an average tendency for later reviews to score lower? How does a publication’s standard deviation of scores come into play?) and I look forward to seeing some interesting findings.

Data gathered via Google, GameStats, GameRankings, MetaCritic and Wikipedia