Who do you call dense? You fall into the trap of thinking of people as binaries, either they are X or not X. That is very american of you, but that is not true at all. There is a reason the US is broken, because they have made this belief of binary people rule everything.

The reality if we talk about Harry Potter for instance isn't that people that used to hate HP and wanted to ban it now love it. That is not what is happening. There are 8 billion people on the world. To expect all of them either love or hate a thing is just untrue. The vast majority is completely indifferent. Even for something as big as Harry Potter. So the ones who hated Harry Potter and wanted to ban it still hate it. The ones who loved still mostly love it. But a group, some of them grew up after Harry Potter was a thing (remember it was big around 1995-2005, now 20 years ago) has taken a stance against it. So the Hogwarts Legacy haters are coming from a new group that was indifferent before. Yet it didn't change much about the people loving it, they still do and so they bought the game. The hate was not doing anything. Not converting the ones that did love it, but also not making the old haters into lovers.

"spite boosting on social media" I think herein lies the main problem. Social media is no reflection of real life - at all. People hate or love things on social media, but they are mostly freaks that don't touch grass, the majority has different preferences. So a big social media campaign is mostly ineffective - regardless about what. This is what I am saying. The hate on social media has no real effect. It kills nothing.

"This is all different from a multiplayer game where you constantly have to hear DEAD GAME DEADME DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY."
You don't bring any proof, you just declare it is true, "trust me bro". I don't buy it. I don't see evidence. I see evidence that social media outrage has little to no effect. If something fails and there is a hate campaign on social media it is merely coincidence.

You talk about Splitgate, I don't even know what that is. I could look it up, but the fact I don't even know - and I am an interested gamer - should tell you already how ineffective the social media bullshit is. From your take I guess it failed. I can tell you it failed because I don't know about it. If I didn't the majority of possible buyers didn't. That is the main reason for stuff failing - not a hate campaign, but broad desinterest. Or more precisely (as always a majority will have no interest): too little interest at all. I can see it with Concord too: I didn't knew about Concord because nobody really spoke about it - until a week or so after release as numbers showed it was failing. Then suddenly it was talked about. That is what kills games: too few people are interested in them.

BTW: I am the guy who says it is hard to predict if Marathon fails: because it is all about how much influx money is needed to keep it alive. It could be very little so it would survive on very low player numbers, except if Sony pulls the plug anyways.

Nah, I personally saw quite a few miserable puritans moaning about Stellar Blade having sexy characters. The "hate" did get blown out of proportion, but it was also a real thing that did exist.

There’s a now a subreddit called “Marathonhate” where thousands of people hang out everyday to watch steam charts together, talk about how much they hate marathon and make jokes involving the word “blast”(it’s actually just saying the word blast in a sentence and acting like that qualifies as humour).

Also, the Highguard Reddit had 28k visitors in the last week despite not existing anymore. It’s now a hangout place for miserable people trying to forget how pathetic their life is by hating other things for no specific reason.

Gaming has always gone through cycles, and always had a problematic segment of the user base. I’d say this is a new low but then there was the whole “GamerGate” thing when people were just openly and unabashedly misogynistic for no particular reason.

That's really sad.

I hope that subreddit is not a popular thing.

The only good thing about this is that it is helping to prove that hating on games for fun is becoming a sport among a very large group of people. Most people keep saying "got nothing to do with hate for the sake of hate, they're just not good games". Well how do you explain thousands of people bashing games that don't even exist anymore? It's because it's become a sport. Paul Tassi was right with his article "Why are we hating on Marathon as if it's a sport"

You mix two things: I don't deny the existance of hate. I say it has no real relation to the sales. Also the exitance of hate doesn't really exclude the possibility of the game being bad (but even a decent game has a good chance of failing). Again: games can succeed with a hate campaign and can fail without. More importantly: with more than 10K games releasing each year, how much games do you think see success in the first place? The likelyhood of failing is much, much, *much* higher than succeeding. And some of the failing games have repotedly before internal communication that it must be a sure thing. But there is no such thing as a sure thing, such communication is a red flag as it more likely shows an internal culture of not acknowledging problems.

My post wasn't about sales though. It was about people denying that there are people hating on games purely for the sake of it, and denying how big this community is. I don't know the impact it's having on sales, it's impossible to prove. What I can say for certain though is that Concord would never have shutdown in only two weeks regardless of how badly it sold, if it wasn't for all the hate it got. It was everyone going crazy over it that forced Sony to shut it down immediately, not bad sales. You think they wouldn't have at least given it a month otherwise?

OK, if you talk about the hate itself, sure, it's the internet, people hate on everything for the silliest reasons. As Stellar Blade and Hogwarts Legacy can be mentioned.

The Concord situation. I dunno what Sony would've done. Sony act increasingly random and unpredictable. The only thing with Concord is: nobody hated on it beforehand (well, probably 3 people did or so), I remember that it wasn't noticed at all in the internetz. But about a week later or so, when the numbers showed how badly it performed, then people started dunking on it. So yeah, it got hate, but only after it was already a failure. How that might or might not have influenced Sony's decision to shut it down I don't know.

I saw plenty of dunking on Concord well before its launch once the beta went live, but frankly it kinda deserved it between being yet more live service slop nobody asked for and its horrendous character designs.

People didn't hate Concord. They were apathetic. Sony thought this was the next big IP that spans all media formats and the reality was. Few even cared about it after they showed it off. When they did a free beta No one cared to play it. It just was not interesting to most people. The only thing people took note is how much it rips off GoTG and how bad the character designs were. Hate? No. Apathy. Hate gets attention. Apathy gets you none. The fact Sony killed it so fast that's when it became the punchline of jokes for games like Highguard. Spectacular failures often are.