So games like Nioh, Persona 5, Titanfall 2 etc all sold relatively poorly, some didnt even make their money back, but the kicker is that a lot of these games are better than the yearly/high profile games. Do you think devs can tell when a game is recieved very well even if it didnt sell very well and do you think that mass buyer appreciation is enough to motivate them to make a sequal even if it may not be as profitable as say a COD clone?

Persona 5 and Nioh absolutely didn't sell poorly lol

So far as i know, they both barely topped 1 million which isnt enough to pay for the average production cost this gen which i heard was between 80-120 million.

Besides that my question still stands being that there were lots of great games that didnt sell enough and some even died because of that such as Kingdoms of Amalur.

Sales are only numbers. Weather or not the game profits is another.

Eg -
Game A sold 1 million units, cost to make was 10 million.
Game B sold 2 million units, cost to make was 40 million.

Game A is in a much better financial position than game B

Well that gives me hope at leasr because i always worry for those niche games. We mostly see all this hype for shit like the next Madden, Assassins Creed, COD while relatively little is heard about Hellblade, Nioh, Nier Automata and so forth. 

About Titanfall, not every shooter is a COD ripoff and its a huge disservice especially to call TitanFall 2 that. That game had huge innovations in multiplayer such as the movement abilities (which COD actually ripped off) and mechs and the second installation had an amazing single player campain.

Persona 5 is at almost 2m copies sold and has PS3 assets so it's not current gen production costs. It's also Atlus' highest selling game ever.

Nioh sold over a million just over month after release and is Koei Tecmo's most successful game ever published in the west. It will also end up being Team Ninja's highest selling game ever and that's all just on the PS4. There's a PC version coming and it should be very popular.

Lesson 1. Not every game is Call of Duty or Assassins Creed.

Nioh and most certainly Pserona 5 did not cost anywhere near that much to develop.

Thats awesome to hear about Persona but like i said, in Niohs case, if that game cost around the average production budget of videogames then selling a little over a million isnt going to cover the likely 80+ million put into it. I could be completely wrong with how much the average game cost or with how much i assume Nioh cost. Like i said, i remember reading about the average prod budget of videogames on some site a few years back and can only assume its gone up

Im aware of your first point and how are you so certain that they didnt cost even anywhere near 80+ million.......to be clear i fucking hope you are right, lol.

Last time you went out to get a bag of doritos or some energy drinks, do you remember seeing any promotions for Nioh or Persona 5?