| dtewi said: I was responding to that previous argument. I never said they were wrong, did I ever say that FF should come to all minds? Popularity does not deal with the topic. It deals with this argument. |
Close enough.
Popularity is understood, in this context, to be a function of sales within a given timeframe. Your question asks "what do peopel think of when they think RPG", which extends to "what is the more popular game", which means "what is the more popular game right now"
Questions of popularity are necessarily assumed to be questions of current popularity, not as a sales aggregate collected over the course of nearly 30 years. Final Fantasy has not had as many players as WoW during any 6-year period in the franchise's entire history, period. Right now, WoW holds FF down and beats it to death, bashing its head in and rubbing its butt on FF's face. That is a fact of current popularity, which is what is understood by popularity in the first place.
Trying to frame popularity as a product of lifetime franchise sales is ridiculous. Pilgrim's Progress has sold God knows how many copies - probably in the order of a couple of hundred million, bare minimum. Does that make it more popular than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? No! Of course it doesn't. PIlgrim's Progress sold much less in the past year, much less the past week, than TGwtDT. The current state of things is that TGwtDT is much more popular than Pilgrim's Progress in spite of selling fewer copies because it has more current readers. That's what popularity means!
