Pretty much, it was only the press that gave Skyrim a pass, it got plenty of criticism elsewhere.  It was the same case for ME3 where the press tried to characterize the complaints that people just wanted a happy ending, and it is the same with DmC where they have tried to make it about hair color.  Of course for Skyrim and ME3, the problems didn't manifest themselves till later, so it didn't hurt sales nearly as much.

Some games despite good rating gets the dirty treatment if all factors are not taken into account. One being the fans. A lesson learnt finally.

The expectations were unrealistic to begin with Metroid has only ever sold at the 1m-1.5m mark on average with only two games passing 2m, Reggie and co misread the whole situation thinking it was going to do numbers in comparison to other high performers of the time when it was only ever going to do Metroid numbers that's why Nintendo aren't rushing out another Metroid because they realize it's never going to be a huge seller that's the only message OM would of sent tbh. An example is Animal Crossing on the Wii wasn't as well recieved but sold 4m plus.

That's not what I recall...

What I remember is accusations of sexism, overall criticism of some gameplay aspects (first person elements mostly), and criticism regarding the story/cutscenes/dialogue. The game was widely considered by the critics to be considerably worse than the Prime games, with a Metacritic score of 79 compared to the Prime games that are in the 90s, with even Hunters above it with an 85 score.

On the other hand, this game was rated around the same as DMC 3 and 4 (84-87), only below the first one, with little criticism towards it. And after that, articles appeared about how "entitled DMC fanboys" or "haters" were the only ones against this game, without apparently having any valid criticism. Like this one:

http://www.vg247.com/2013/01/15/dmc-devil-may-cry-fans-are-a-crying-shame/

But of course, I can imagine some of these "journalists" either doing that or the opposite, so I'll take your word for it if you say it happened... I just hope that gamers in general stop treating review scores as anything other than opinions (at best), even when these agree with you. Oh, and I would like to see review scores return to whatever arithmetic hell they came from...

My question is why would they expect those sales? It's basically a very old IP that has gone in a completely new direction. Sales seem spot on to me.

I think people are just less inclined to buy $60 single player games. Other then GOW and Uncharted, I don't we've any such game succeed this gen.

half the Uncharted games have a MP component but i see your point.

Change his hair back and you'll get 500k more sales lol

Also I'm all for developer freedom. I don't like fans dictating how a game should be.

Ah that reminds me of the reception to Raiden on MGS2. People like to use different scales for different cases.