Ever heard of the order 1886 or kill zone 2 and 3, how about crysis 2 and 3 all were graphical stunners and way cooler looking then Senua's Saga which looks stupid, a d they all flopped it's nothing new. 

Starfield failed cause it was too ambitious and focused on the wrong things it's graphics are nice but not top 5 best looking games.

Basically you want developers to stop making ambitious open world games with big budgets.

Crysis 2 sold over 3 million copies at least, even Order 1886 was over 2 million, Senua's Saga is trending below HiFi Rush, that's like horrendous. 

Microsoft paid $120 mill for this studio too, and then $80+ mill probably for the game, I'm pretty sure the reason they bought the studio is because they thought this game would be a hit XBox showcase title. Yikes. 

Wouldn't want to be in the office when Phil is explaining this latest mess to his bosses higher up. 

If Skyrim is Wii Sports, and Fallout is Wii Fit, then Starfield is Bethesda's Wii Music, lol. A sales dud with a lot of hype as the next big thing. 

I think this game basically killed the XBox, when it failed, Microsoft's higher ups said to Phil "enough of this, we're basically going third party and you get one shot with Call of Duty on Game Pass and if that doesn't work, you're really in deep shit then". 

There was a lot going on against Alan Wake 2

-It's a sequel that came out 13 years after the first game, which wasn't even that succesfull
-No physical release on consoles (it's coming now but I'm wondering if it's too late)
-It's exclusive to the Epic Store on PC, and I'm not sure if it's ever coming to Steam, considering Epic funded and published the game
-It released very close to Spiderman 2 on PS5 (It came out a week later)

All of this hurt the game sales pretty bad. It's not fair to say "see?! this pretty game didn't sell well at all and it's pretty!!!" because Alan Wake 2 didn't flop because it's a graphical showcase. It flopped for the reasons I mentioned.

There's a lot going for it too though

Lots of praise from the gaming press, even Game of the Year wins, how often does a Game of the Year title not sell reasonably well? Baldur's Gate 3 won some GOTY's too and it's been a dormant franchise for quite some time too and it's selling great. 

Lots of hype from the tech websites, lots of cross-promotion with Nvidia. It's even bundled with a lot of Nvidia GPUs and laptops. 

Control, the studio's previous game, has developed a pretty good following too. 

This shouldn't be struggling this hard just to break even. It's not only one of the best looking games ever made, it has GOTY wins/noms, it may not be on Steam, but it is easily available on PC and it's also on the PS5 and XBox which aren't like new systems, we're talking like almost 60 mill PS5s and 25 mill XBox Series consoles. 

It depends how low you want to set the bar, but I don't view it as a great performance. It's not a bomb like Senua's Saga though and it's not the epic dissapointment sales wise that Starfield is ... those are the bombas of bombas alongside Forspoken and probably FF7 Rebirth. 

But it should be a game that is gaining some traction and selling well at least on the PS5/XSX. 

Exactly.  But Sound doesn't want to have a discussion.  He wants to tell everyone they are wrong.

But back to AW2, I would love to buy, if it had a Steam release, which may never happen.  

The clear direction in gaming is consumers what a choice on how they play.  Exclusives aren't working anymore.  AW2 locked behind Epic was a bad choice.  

Rebirth and 16 being exclusive for over a year hurts sales as well. 

Pretty games aren't flopping.  Pretty games with poor decisions are flopping.  

Edit

And you are spot on, digital only release on consoles was a bad idea.  Console gamers still have a large physical ownership desire.  It will be interesting to see if the physical release boosts sales.  

They can't release on Steam because it has to hit a certain sales threshold (they owe Epic money) but it's selling lets say "slowly" so it's taking a long time to come over. There's still no real great reasons why this shouldn't be selling at least reasonably well on the PS5/XSX. It hasn't sold enough to pay back the budget that the developer owes to Epic.

This also goes to show how many hoops a medium sized dev has to jump through to get a "good looking" game made ... these studios can't afford even budgets of like $80 million. They don't have that kind of money themselves, so are beholden to whoever will finance them, which is another problem with rising budgets.

Boulders gate 3 is taxing on ps5 and Xbox series x. Perfomance mode is 40-50fps and 30fps and is not even locked. It's not something that could run on last gen consoles with out deep compromise.

Not being on steam and not having physical is a massive disadvantage. We have so much choices for gaming why buy a half assed release on top of that it released near mario wonder and spiderman 2 release date. If didn't do that this game would have been a much bigger success.

Another big flop this gen ... Immortals of Aveum, listen to their galaxy brain CEO was talking about all the graphics features of the games and Unreal Engine 5 and Lumen this and Lumen that and the best of the best visuals, etc. etc. etc.

Fast forward after release:

A former employee at the studio said spending around $125 million on Immortals of Aveum was a "truly awful idea."

I mean this would be funny if a bunch of people didn't lose their jobs. 40 people got fired after the sales figures came in, and now just a couple of months ago another 30 people there were put on furlough (basically unpaid leave).

That's gotta be up there as one of the biggest bombs this generation too. Hopefully Microsoft doesn't do the same thing to the Senua's Saga developer, chasing the graphics fairy was stupid, but people losing their jobs over it sucks.

69 on Metacritic.  So people don't buy bad games?  Thanks for the news flash.  

Meanwhile DD2 sold 2.5 million copies in 11 days because gamers prefer good games.  

There are games in that score range that sell fine actually, but maybe the game would've been half decent if the studio head was focused on gameplay instead of wanking off to Unreal Engine 5 features that no one cared about. Development priorities matter especially when you don't have the luxury of a proven IP license like a Harry Potter or some shit. 

If you're going to focus so much on graphics, odds are the gameplay is going to suffer or you're looking at a dev cycle of 7-8+ years if you want the best of both worlds and that's going to mean a massively expensive game most likely.