| IkePoR said: I want to push back on this. I think the cream of the crop always rises to the top - rarely later than sooner. If a game doesn't catch on/sell well, it simply wasn't good enough. I will admit there's some cognitive dissonance here; I loved Pandora's Tower but it sold shit and will be memory-holed in gaming history BUT... it just wasn't good enough. I don't think there's ever a "good" reason an excellent game flops. |
Pandora's Tower wasn't a well received game.
Would you say that Farmville is peak gaming? At one point that was one of the biggest games, tens of millions of people were playing it daily on FB and elsewhere.
I'd argue most of the most critically acclaimed games did not do amazing relatively speaking. The big exception is GTA. That's pretty much the only time where the biggest selling game happens to be one of the most critically acclaimed. Super Mario Galaxy is outsold by plenty of games.
Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are very famous in the industry, they frequently get credited by game developers as inspiration, and yet they both sold very poorly.
Great games usually do well, but there's definitely not a 1:1 of doing well and selling well. There are some games that are very beloved and yet poor selling. And some games that are kind of hated and yet sold well.
There's a million reasons that affect how well a game does. How good it is, whether that concept is really appealing to a lot of people (Wii Sports was extremely appealing to tons of people, but I don't think most people would say it was the quintessential gaming experience), whether that appeal is marketed, whether the market is interested (I don't think Demon's Souls/Dark Souls was an interesting concept for the market when it came out, but the fanbase has grown substantially).
