| WereKitten said: Your joke similitude doesn't hold for a simple reason: sales don't equate to the enjoyment the buyers had from a game, even if you were to take that as a candidate measure of quality. Most game sales happen without the buyer having tried the game first, thus the satisfaction with the product is statistically unknown. Let alone things like immediate satisfaction versus long-term satisfaction, or value perception a posteriori. None of which applies to a joke. Some games are cult hits even with poor sales because the little audience they gathered is very vocal about their perceived quality. Others sell well over time because of word of mouth which once again is rooted in user satisfaction. And others sell well but are rubbish. Maybe well-marketed, maybe sporting some popular icon, maybe appealing for people who don't look for much quality, and yet still rubbish. Just as a fever might make you perform blood tests looking for an infection, but might end up being caused by something else entirely, so sales can suggest that there's the chance of great quality, which deserves better examination. But there's no strict correlation between the symptom and a single possible cause. |
While I agree that there ARE cases of unsatisfied customers, (obviously), I think you seriously underestimate the power of word of mouth.
Wii Music would be a good example. Nintendo clearly expected it to be the next Wii Fit, and it was marketed as such. Yet, people decided that it isn't good enough to keep playing with it every day, telling about it to everyone, etc., as they did with Wii Fit. Maybe it was the content, the gameplay, the theme, I don't know.
A contrary example would be The Sims, that was a minor project at Maxis, with almost zero expectations, after the team got run out of ideas with a dozen mediocre "Sim" games. But for some reason, it became the best selling PC game ever.
Of course, saying that a cult classic is a bad game because only a small minority of 100 million gamers bought it, would be like saying that The Sims is bad because only a small minority of Earth's population bought it. It doesn't matter. The rest is a not the market. Its the same as what I said about comparing genres.
For example, The Path is full of deep symbolism. You could say, that even though it only sold a few thousand, it did remarkably well for a game in the tiny "deep symbolism genre", and its market.
ps.: "people who don't look for much quality" is nonsense, of course everyone is looking for some sort of quality, as "quality" basically means "good", maybe just from different perspectives.
