| 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. |
Well I don't know what your definition of not catching on/selling well is. I think some of the publishers of the aforementioned francises were happy with sub 500k sales for their games at the time, and considered selling well. But the exponential growth in sales for some established franchises I don't think can be attributed to a quality difference between the games.
Rather than selling good or bad, I'd phrase it as its ability to reach its target audience.
An audience that was there and would have liked the games, but didn't play them.
That can include franchises that already sold well, and then suddenly sold many times better.
Fromsofts Soulslike games were all well recieved critically acclaimed games that sold very well. Sekiro won Game of the Year, etc. And their multiplat games all sold around the 10 million mark for over a decade. It looked like there may not be much more possible growth for the series. But then Elden Ring sold 25M+.
I don't think it being open world explains such a dramatic growth in sales.
Another example is Among Us. While it clearly also benefitted from the Covid situation, we can rule out any difference in quality affecting its surge in popularity. It simply got more exposure from some popular streamers playing it a few years after launch, and almost overnight exploded in popularity and became a huge phenomenon.
Last edited by Hiku - on 26 August 2024
