hype. crap games can sell with enough hype.

Word of mouth is more important. Hype will get you quick, early sales. But word of mouth will keep a steady stream of those sales coming in. This fact is negated though by hype that garners a few million sales in just a couple of days. Then word of mouth, while still good, doesn't matter so much.

I wanna say word of mouth only cuz word of mouth usually comes from friends and family. And those people you actually trust whereas hype comes from many different sources, whether trustworthy or not. I think more people are willing to buy a game their friend says is awesome than a game that some random magazine writer says is awesome.

Which has a bigger impact? I don't know. Maybe that's the wrong question.

Maybe the question should be which one is healthy for the brand and the company and the customers. Long tail sales based on word of mouth are better for all involved. The long and short of it is: You can't sell based on word of mouth if the product is poor. Pre-release hype can help sell a poor product. That's not to say all hyped games are poor; of course hype can happen naturally with sequels. But if you have a crappy game and you need it to sell well, you better do a lot of pre-release advertisement. If you're relying on a few people to try and enjoy the game and then the word to slowly spread over months and months to make most of your sales, it better be a really good game.

Word of mouth wins most of the time.

if word of mouth was the major reason, we would have like 5 ps3 exclusives reach 10 million sales

We would have the same if hype was the major reason... judging by the sales, neither is a factor :O

Seriously though, word of mouth!

Call of Duty MW = excellent word of mouth...in fact many PS3 games have great word of mouth....how do you think Uncharted sold so well?

Hype only lasts as long as the marketing campaign building up to a launch and immediately following a launch.

After that initial 1 week to however long the ad campaign lasts, it comes back to word of mouth whether a title will see sustained sales.

well usually the hype for the ps3 exclusives is exclusive to internet goers.

games like Call of Duty, Final Fantasy, Halo, Gears, GTA have tons and tons of hype outside of sites such as this.

PS3 games seem to have tons of hype on the internet, then sale well because of great word of mouth. but have/will not ever get the mass market apeal like said games