fatslob-:O said:
zorg1000 said:
So if sales=quality does that also mean quality=sales? What if a game/movie/book/CD is 100% liked by everyone who played/watched/read/listened to it but still didnt sell extremely well do to lack of advertising and public awareness? Would that make it a non quality product because it didnt sell well?
The lack of advertising is one thing but if the product like minecraft was able to sell so well without any spending on marketing then it just goes to show you that market demand is the determinant factor.
lets say a publisher spends $1 billion dollars on advertising a specific game, making sure there is a TV spot on every channel at least once per hour, has an ad in every major magazine, pays reviewers to give perfect scores, has the most popular celebrities hype it up and has promos at every major sporting event which causes the public awareness of the game to be through the roof. The game sells 10 million units week one but most those people realize they hate the game and sell it before they even finish it. The game sells zero untis from that point forward and is so hated that the game never gets any sequels and the publisher goes bankrupt from spending so much money on advertising.
Your example is more than ridiculous ... Like said before "Customers are not perfect either." but they really aren't that stupid to let that situation happen. Marketing and hype can only go so far to distort sales but overall customers will still determine the quality. BF4 sold less than BF3 despite having more marketing push. Hype and Marketing can not create market demand.
Compare that to a game with little to no advertising with a very small amount of people who even know the game exists. The game sells 100k in the first month and almost everybody who plays it loves it. Through word of mouth the game becomes more popular and sales begin to increase, over the course of a year it goes on to sell 3 million units and the company makes a ton of money allowing them to make multiple sequels. Which one of the these games would be considered a more quality product?
That obviously is a decent quality product seeing as how it has meaningful legs to be able to pull off decent long term sales but your last example is mostly null and void.
Or another example a game releases with a price tag of $1 and sells 30 million compare that to a game that costs $60 and sells 25 million. The $1 game costs 1/60 the price but barely outsells the other. Is it a more quality product just because it was able to sell more?
This is the console space ... It's obvious that the $60 game is of better quality but profits/revenue are also another measure to quality too but so are customers.
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Ok so this makes it seem like ur saying sales and quality do not equal the same thing but they do for the most part have a strong correlation which I agree with. An absolutely shitty game will not sell 10s of millions and its also possible for a high quality game to be a sleeper hit and not sell well. Sales=/=quality but they do go hand in hand many times.
Ur previous posts about this subject seem like ur trying to say if a game sells better than another game then it is automatically a higher quality game which is not true all the time. Advertising is a big part of sales as is genre. Certain genres simply dont appeal to as many people as others. A platformer like Mario has wide appeal to kids, parents, men, women, basically every demographic can enjoy Mario. They are easy to pick up and play and are family friendly. On the other hand Survival-Horror games have a smaller window to sell to, not because platformers are of higher quality but because most kids wont be allowed to play them, many times they are more difficult which makes novice gamers less likely to play them and if ur a scaredy cat, dont enjoy violence, gore disgusts u then ur not likely to play these types of games.
Install base can also have a major role whether or not a game sells well. Ur right when u say the point of a game Is to sell the hardware so In theory If a game Is the highest quality game ever than It should cause the hardware sales to surpass the competition. But lets say a console has the highest quality game ever but the rest of Its library Is garbage, Is that game going to cause sales to explode? Not likely since most people dont buy a console for a single game. Now lets say another console doesnt have the best game ever but It has over 500 really good games, will this console sell extremely well? Most likely because again people buy a console for Its library and not one single game In most cases.
All im trying to say is that u cant jump to conclusions and say a game is of higher quality than another based solely on sales, yes quality is a strong factor but there are many others that go along with why or why not a game sells well.
