Tim Schafer: Gamers Worry Too Much About Sales. Agree or Disagree?

[Reasonable]

goddog said:

Dgc1808 said:
It stuns the development of new IP's..... and older one's get milked more... I agree with him.

Person A: "Check out this game, it's called Deadly Creatures/ValkyriaChronicles/MadWorld"
Person B: "Look cool, but I heard it's not selling much..."
Person A: "Yea. I'm gonna buy it though, it's pretty awesome"
Person B: "Why?? It's selling like trash"
Person A: "Perhaps, but I really enjoy. Maybe you should try it out, to."
Person B: "No thanks, I'll go with CoD:WaW. It's awesome and it's selling like Hot cakes".
Person A: "But.... wouldn't you like to try something new???"
Person B: "Maybe when it starts selling more..."
Person A: "What if more people took that attitude...."
Person B: "Then it probably won't sell much and I won't buy it...."
Person A: 0.o...

 

I have never in my life heard that as a reason not to buy a game, a console (both the cube and the virtualboy) perhaps but not a game. reasons ive heard not to buy a game, the demo blew, the cover system is annoying as hell, the AI is dumb as a tone of bricks, the game crashes constantly, the game though it looks cool is unintuitive and highly repetitive, the controls for this game make you want to snap the handheld/controller in two (for the love of god why are there not two nubs on the psp)

 

I understand its sarcasm, but for the life of me i hope people are not so stupid to only judge games on sales, and that the people who are, are too dumb to know what the sales are

 

but maybe i expect too much of people

 

While the conversation is exagerated there is no doubt casual browsers in stores look to the ranked titles, and a title that's selling well would imply it is good while a poorly selling title much further down the charts will imply it is not good.

I too assume everyone does research, reads reviews, and understands their own tastes, but of course this is a pretty weak assumption, and any time spend perusing a game store shows how many purchases are impluse or on the recomendation of friends.