You kind of missed one of the important points I made: profitability. I'm fairly certain that Tom Watts, even with his lack of mainstream appeal, still manages to get by on what sales his music does get; clearly, or he would've left the musical entertainment industry by now. One of the key points I was making was that unprofitable games that are highly acclaimed are still unprofitable. And don't think that has no impact, either. There were an awful lot of game studios with recently released big-name titles reporting a loss during 2008. And of course the opposite is true too: games reviled by reviews that get droves of sales are immensely profitable.
"Quality" as defined by sites such as Metacritic have no meaningful correlation to the most significant quantities, sales and profitability. Meaning they have no correlation to the success or failure of the games and the system they're on at large, either, nor to overall popularity. All sites like Metacritic show is a snapshot of a given community of gamers' overall opinions concerning a mass of games, and while it is true that demand drives supply, in markets that survive, it's the overall demand that drives supply, not a small piece of the market demand.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
