What the hell is up with infamous

[Bodhesatva]

There are a lot of ways to appeal to people.

Some games appeal very strongly to a small subset of people, but are very unattractive to everyone else. In such cases, the people who absolutely love the game can't understand why everyone else doesn't love it.

Another consideration is that highly derivative games tend not to sell as well as the games they are copying. A great example of this is Forza: its featureset is nearly identical to Gran Turismo, and it gets reviews which are in the ballpark of GT, as well -- inf act, Forza 2 has a higher metacritic rating than the last GT.  However, Forza 2 sold 1/4 as much as the last GT, because GT was the first big console racing sim.

I think it could be some combination of those factors.