Both those games are consider to be two of the greatest PS2 games and possibly just the greatest games ever made period. Yet the sales for both were just mediocre.
Both games have incomplete sales on VG Chartz but from the sources I found Ico sold about 160,000 in Japan, 250,000 in America, 200,000 in Europe and in Asia and Korea both had 20,000. So ICO sold a total of 650,000. (Also here's another source that claims it's roughly at 950,000). So it doesn't look like ICO hit 1 million.
Now Shadow of the Colossus, according to VG Chartz SotC sold 730,000 in America and 200,000 in Japan but no Others sales. So it's safe to say SotC made it over the million mark, but not by that much. Now from that source I gave for the 950,000 ICO sales, it also had SotC WW sales. According to them they have SotC estimated at 1.5 million, which sounds about right with VG Chartz numbers.
So for two of the greatest games on the PS2 and with the PS2's user base being roughly 125 million owners, both games sold a combine of roughly 2.2 million. That doesn't seem that good for me. In my opinion both games deserve at least over 5 million in sales each.
So why was the sales so small for these two great games?
