HappySqurriel on 16 March 2012
I have come to the conclusion that the main factors that drive success of games are the following:
- Quality (kind of obvious)
- Being part of a well known series (people who bought your previous game will likely buy the next game)
- Being developed by a well known studio (every day more people recognise the studios that created the games they loved)
- Having a large marketing budget
- Being in a popular genre
While there has been the occassional Nintendo game that has none of these (usually a very low budget game) the vast majority of the games Nintendo has seen success with have had 3 or more of these qualities going for it; and in many cases all 5. In contrast, the majority of third party games have none of these and the few games that people say "flopped" have 1 or 2 of these things going for them ...
