Can we please re-define the term FLOP

[Kantor]

Barozi said:

Kantor said:

Barozi said:
LBP is still a flop. Not sales wise, but it was supposed to move tons of hardware and attract a new crowd of casual gamers.

Fell short of expectations....yes that's a good definition of a flop.
You could even call the DS version of GTA Chinatown Wars a flop. It was the most expensive handheld GTA game Rockstar ever made and it sold only fraction of the previous PSP games.
However The PSP version is obviously the bigger flop.

So a cheap game expected to sell 15 million which sells 10 million is a flop.

And an expensive game expected to sell 1 million which sells 1.5 million isn't?

That's pretty flawed.

What sane human being would even expect huge numbers from a cheap game if he wasn't 100% sure ?

If it really sells only 2/3 of the expected result (publisher's or developer's estimates), then it's certainly a flop. You could argue if the flop is the game itself or the guys who made that estimate

Animal Crossing Wii might be a good example for that although I don't know what the initial expectations were, but I'm pretty sure they were much higher than the actual sales.

 

However it's clear that in the end there must be different categories of flops.

Just as an example, the first two games I thought of for each category:

Cheap game: NSMBWii

Expensive game: Heavy Rain.

Though NSMBWii is expected to sell more than 15 million and HR is expected to sell less.