I suspect that a lot of those horendous games are actually ultra low budget, that some of them actually turn a profit.
Formula: Make a crappy game, talk about it a bit to create mediocre buzz, release it and hope a lot of customers won't pay attention to reviews.
A game like The Fighter Within that is still charting and moving copies, 6 months after it was declared a complete turd.
A game like Ride to Hell, which probably sold more copies because of box art than because of marketing.
I base my thinking on the movies by Uwe Böll, who keeps finding investors after churning out dozens of utterly horendous films. It turns out, he makes huge bucks because of the ultra low budgets...







