I don't know about everyone else, but I don't hate sales numbers.  They are very important.  They are just not always a great indicator of quality.  Inferior products win in the market all the time for a variety of reasons.

I would say that sales are a great indicator of market appeal.

More importantly, how long did it take him to write this review?

What were the critic scores of this game?

Then what else can define quality quantitatively ? 

How is minecraft a smash success if it had no marketing, was a new IP, and it came from a small unknown developer at first ? The biggest factor to sales is quality. Marketing/hardcore hype won't cut it. 

@Bold Those are some pretty bad excuses if you ask me. If the game were good then there would be no excuses as to why it sells bad. If a game were truly bad then it would have never been supported by the mass market. Ever heard of the term the customers are always right about what they want. Bad businessmen will make bad excuses as to why the game sells poorly. They won't ever tell you the exact reason and it's probably because the product is shit. 

"Then what else can define quality quantitatively?" Probably nothing can.  Not sales, and not review scores.  If I had to pick one, I would probably pick reviews as being closer.  Even then, with how bad game journalism is right now, that only really gives you the 'hardcore' perspective.  I guess the closest you could get would be big consumer surveys after people play the game in question.

"How is minecraft a smash success..." Did you just ignore that list I posted?  Let's see that again:

Genre, art style, marketing, current market saturation level (both in and out of genre), publisher brand strength, developer brand strength, IP brand strength, consumer excitement, reviews, and quality all play a role in how much a game will sell.

Mincraft gets big points in a lot of these areas:

• Genre - Sandbox type games are very popular.  This particular type, where you mine and build anything you want, didn't really exist before.  Which leads me to...
• Current Market Saturation - Nothing like this game really existed before.  There is a huge first mover advantage here.  I would say this is the biggest reason the game is so big.  Malstrom says new content is what makes a game a success.  This game has that in spades.
• Marketing - True, this game does not have traditional marketing.  But it does have a ton of positive word of mouth marketing.  Which I would argue is even more valuable.
• Consumer excitement - See above.
• Quality - Yes, I agree this is a quality game, and that certainly helps a lot.

Then I guess review scores say that wii play bad was even though the mass market disagrees. I would rather trust the large sum of what people want than a small sample of reviews. Reviews are nowhere near close to the general audience thinks. Why are the user scores for modern warfare 3 so low ? The hardcore has basically infected game journalism to become not reliable again. 

Minecraft is what you would call a blue ocean game. Like malstrom once said, "It is harder to sell in a cold market than a hot market." Minecraft was in itself innovative by mass market and that added to the quality of the game.

I agree with the fact that minecraft has new content but that goes inline that new content increases the quality of a game also. 

It's true that the marketing came from the word of mouth, however the game needed to retain some initial quality in order to do that. 

Again to gain consumer excitement with minecraft it had to have some initial quality otherwise people wouldn't recommend it in the first place.

This basically all boils down to the quality of a game and nothing else. Those points were a part of quality. 

Please describe how inferior products can win ? You basically said inferior products in the market wins so I took that as you saying that inferior games can win in the market so how exactly is that strawman ? Oh and your reasons as to why they win is mostly excuses. It's not my fault that some people see more quality in some alcoholic beverages. What's more is that I wouldn't know because I don't drink those. 

Really ?! So your denying that people who wanted those apple products didn't want it ?! Instead you'll probably resort to saying that apple had the best marketing to do it but that alone will not cut it. Their iPods and iPhones were pretty good products at the time. Your right about nobody asking for motion gaming but your dead wrong about it being a fad. Nintendo aimed for a blue ocean strategy and that is how they flourished. Hence they created a new market with no contendors. 

Don't get pissy because I called your BS statement.

No, you just gave me a useless comment.