| 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. |
Buyers aren't completely helpless in the relationship between game publishers and themselves. Its a more complicated relationship and it isn't a one off event like you imply. For a title like Halo, Bungie has developed a good reputation for delivering good quality Halo titles so the public can expect a future Halo release to be enjoyable because they had enjoyed a previous installment. Beyond the games industry you have animation studios like Pixar whom consistantly release good work, so therefore you could go to one of their movies sight unseen because their reputation from consistantly releasing good work precedes them. For both Bungie and Pixar, releasing a lower quality title can effect their current projects sales and future sales as well.
Btw strictly speaking the sales numbers are a quality of a commercially released title. So for any of the games we talk about on Vgchartz, sales are always a quality of any game. Diminishing the importance of sales as a quality of a game doesn't mean that sales cease to be a quality of any game.
Tease.
