It’s the time for publicly owned companies such as EA and Gameloft to announce their Q3 financial results.

Equally the PocketGamer.biz abacus has been working overtime to tally up the components of our latest quarterly Quality Index.

The concept is simple.

For the period between 1st July to 30th September 2009, we make a list of all the iPhone games released and see what review scores they received from a selection of websites to create an overall average mark.

We then order all the games which received three or more reviews in terms of their average score - from the highest to the lowest.

Thus the Quality Index is created.

iBlasting to the top

The top game this quarter was Godzilab’s iBlast Moki with an impressive average of 9.5 out of 10, which is higher than Q2’s winners Real Racing and Flight Control. They both scored 9.33.

Q1 2009's chart topper Zen Bound remains the best reviewed iPhone game ever however with a total of 9.75.



But while iBlast Moki comes out on top, there’s little real difference in terms of the games in second and third place - Taito’s Space Invaders Infinity Gene, and ngmoco and Hand Circus’ Rolando 2.

Indeed, you could argue that with six reviews each compared to iBlast Moki’s four, they are all effectively equal.

Perhaps what’s more relevant to ponder however is that despite these three games being of the highest quality, none of them set the App Store download charts alight.

Critical acclaim doesn’t always translate to commercial success.

Methodology #1

To order the list, any game generating the same average score from more reviews is marked higher. See Real Soccer 2010 and Dungeon Hunter and Hybrid: Eternal Whisper.)

Methodology #2

As per previous Quality Indexes, the sites used in our research were: Pocket Gamer, Pocket Gamer France, IGN Wireless, Slide To Play, 148Apps, Touchgen, AirGamer, Mobile Game FAQs, and Macworld.

Of these websites, Macworld and Touchgen mark out of five but include half marks so these scores can be doubled to ten without trouble.
Slide To Play uses a 1 to 4 scale. This causes statistical artifacts, especially in terms of the numbers of 4/4 scores it awards (which were converted to 10/10), boosting the average of games that score highly in comparison to other sites which rarely award the ultimate score.