Next-Gen digs through six years of game review scores to find out which months have hosted the highest-quality games. Here's a teaser: December 2007 stunk it up.

 

Last week we did heavy-hitting sales figures. This week we're having a bit of fun with review scores.

While many people felt that 2007 was quite possibly the best year ever for videogames as far as game quality, a feature we ran last winter showed that overall review scores were quite low historically speaking. What we didn't do at the time is look more closely at the correlation between review scores and the time of year.

Is there a “best month of the year” for games? Are there months when publishers dump crap games on the market? Is there a month with the highest review scores ever? Is there a month with the worst review scores ever? Did we go hopelessly nuts collating the data, crunching the numbers, and making an absolutely stunning visual aid that reveals all?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And...yes!

Ooooh, Pretty Colors

Here is the color-coded table that tells you everything you wanted to know about monthly review score averages from January 2002 through December 2007. For the record, only consoles are included because handhelds have significantly lower review scores as a group.



The greenest green in this table represents the highest monthly averages while the reddest red represents the depressingly low ones. Take a minute to look it over and then we'll give you the guided tour.

No One Expected February

Scanning across the rows of the table, you can see easily which months get the good games and which get the trash.

• February turns out to have the best average review scores at 70.6%.
• August is a close runner-up at 70.2%
• May through July are rotten, with averages from 65.0% up to 66.2%.
• December – unsurprisingly – is the absolute worst, with a stinky 64.1%

If you'd asked us beforehand, we would have guessed October or November for the best month...not February. After all, don't publishers try to put out great games during that time of year? Yes, they do, but then all the other publishers put out a lot of crap to cash in on the buying frenzy created by all those good games! So it's a wash.