My Battlefield 4 campaign review...

[theRepublic]

fatslob-:O said:

theRepublic said:

fatslob-:O said:

@Everyone 

I love how people hate sales numbers sooo much. They are the ones to speak about the truth of the quality of the product.

I don't know about everyone else, but I don't hate sales numbers.  They are very important.  They are just not always a great indicator of quality.  Inferior products win in the market all the time for a variety of reasons.

I would say that sales are a great indicator of market appeal.

Then what else can define quality quantitatively ? 

How is minecraft a smash success if it had no marketing, was a new IP, and it came from a small unknown developer at first ? The biggest factor to sales is quality. Marketing/hardcore hype won't cut it. 

@Bold Those are some pretty bad excuses if you ask me. If the game were good then there would be no excuses as to why it sells bad. If a game were truly bad then it would have never been supported by the mass market. Ever heard of the term the customers are always right about what they want. Bad businessmen will make bad excuses as to why the game sells poorly. They won't ever tell you the exact reason and it's probably because the product is shit. 

"Then what else can define quality quantitatively?" Probably nothing can.  Not sales, and not review scores.  If I had to pick one, I would probably pick reviews as being closer.  Even then, with how bad game journalism is right now, that only really gives you the 'hardcore' perspective.  I guess the closest you could get would be big consumer surveys after people play the game in question.

"How is minecraft a smash success..." Did you just ignore that list I posted?  Let's see that again:

Genre, art style, marketing, current market saturation level (both in and out of genre), publisher brand strength, developer brand strength, IP brand strength, consumer excitement, reviews, and quality all play a role in how much a game will sell.

Mincraft gets big points in a lot of these areas:

• Genre - Sandbox type games are very popular.  This particular type, where you mine and build anything you want, didn't really exist before.  Which leads me to...
• Current Market Saturation - Nothing like this game really existed before.  There is a huge first mover advantage here.  I would say this is the biggest reason the game is so big.  Malstrom says new content is what makes a game a success.  This game has that in spades.
• Marketing - True, this game does not have traditional marketing.  But it does have a ton of positive word of mouth marketing.  Which I would argue is even more valuable.
• Consumer excitement - See above.
• Quality - Yes, I agree this is a quality game, and that certainly helps a lot.

"Those are some pretty bad excuses if you ask me."  Not excuses, just reality.

"If a game were truly bad then it would have never been supported by the mass market."  Nice strawman.  Where do I say that a bad game sold well? (In case you were wondering, I think Wii Sports is a very high quality game.)  This is probably in reference to where I said that inferior products sometimes win in the market.  Sometimes that is on price.  Quality usually costs more, so a cheaper product can sell more.  Sometimes it is on marketing.  I've seen a documentary that did a blind taste test with Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light.  Nobody could tell them apart.  Yet they don't all sell in the same numbers.  That is because of marketing.

"Ever heard of the term the customers are always right about what they want." Yes, I have heard that, and it is wrong.  Dead wrong.  As much as I don't like Apple products, Steve Jobs was right when he said that customers don't know what they want until you show them.  That is how Apple was able to create or redefine products, and then make huge profits.  That is how Nintendo created the Wii.  Nobody was asking for motion gaming.  But once people saw it, they said "Holy crap, I want that!"