I suspect his surprise is a result of the overall decline in full price retail titles.
It appears that's what "surprisingly exclusive" refers to, yes. But "only 90" definitely includes everything with an 85+ score, regardless of type.
Reviews are subjective opinion pieces, beyond the shallowest surface "does it run adequately?" level. Someone who played GTAV last year and enjoyed it enough to score it highly would still enjoy it enough to score it highly on a different piece of hardware this year and there is an element of decay because games as a whole are iterative and refine themselves.
This is all very possible, and I believe it could be true. That doesn't mean it actually is. Do you have info indicating so, or just plausibility? (Note that I don't think the latter answer is fatal to your argument, I'm just interested if you have suggestive data.)
But "Thing I reviewed well last year is still good this year" does not mean "I will rebuy thing I bought last year", so it is hugely disingenous to reframe "There are a lot of high scored titles on a platform" as "getting great games at a faster rate than any previous platform"...
It's the exact opposite of disingenuous, it's a simple fact. No one was talking about reviewing habits, or spending habits. As I've already explained, the statement is in a context where Metacritic is agreed as a usable metric, and where we're examining the entire release slate of console platforms. I've been clear that if you carve a subset out of Metacritic to compare, or if you want to wholly dismiss Metacritic as valid, my conclusion may not stand (see below). But in the original context it's the only possible conclusion.
...I'm focusing on the retail titles that are new to this generation because that's the category that's relevant for Dragon Quest XI.
I understand that the PS4 has 80 zillion indie titles and remasters, believe me, it's a key differentiator to the make-up of this generation, but that's not the product category Dragon Quest XI is in.
I know that you intended to focus on this comparison, and as I've previously said I mentioned nothing germane to this larger point. What I was responding to was your statement that there were "only 90" games with 85+ Metacritic scores. That isn't a subset, but the whole release slate. Nevertheless, the qualifier "only" seems to indicate a belief that 90 is smaller than expected. As I showed, it's much larger than expected.
That was in a wide context, but now let me go ahead and tailor it for the exact comparison you were making. If we check Metacritic only for console retail titles--not DLC or indies--and we also remove all remasters/remakes, how does the comparison stand? For the first 45 months of its life, Xbox 360 then has 46 titles rated 85+. The PS4 has 40.
So in fact, even in the comparison you propose, there's nothing very unusual or surprisingly low about PS4's amount of high-rated games. The restriction means it's no longer far and away the biggest list, or indeed first at all. But it's still in the top three, not far behind second place*. So your characterization really isn't justified even under the strict interpretation of your comparison.
*With these parameters, PS3 is now the high outlier, with 63 titles.
