This.

Developers and publishers don't worry enough about sales until it's too late and they're almost going bankrupt. Then suddenly sales become important and a dice is rolled to decide their future.

“Fans worry too much about sales, to tell you the truth,” Schafer told me. He didn’t sound worried. “As long as you make a cool game, publishers want to talk to you… [They say,] ‘We liked ‘Psychonauts. and we think we could have sold it better.’”

I have no disrespect for Tim Schafer, but his position is a consequence of the industry's bad strategies. Bottom line video games are a business no matter what its "rock stars" think.

And Microsoft loves the game even if they saw it's finacial mediocerty from a mile away... thus dropping the publishing rights.  I'm glad it's on Xbox Originals... I'm also glad that Microsoft went out of their way to get the game BC.

It stuns the development of new IP's..... and older one's get milked more... I agree with him.

Person A: "Check out this game, it's called Deadly Creatures/ValkyriaChronicles/MadWorld"
Person B: "Look cool, but I heard it's not selling much..."
Person A: "Yea. I'm gonna buy it though, it's pretty awesome"
Person B: "Why?? It's selling like trash"
Person A: "Perhaps, but I really enjoy. Maybe you should try it out, to."
Person B: "No thanks, I'll go with CoD:WaW. It's awesome and it's selling like Hot cakes".
Person A: "But.... wouldn't you like to try something new???"
Person B: "Maybe when it starts selling more..."
Person A: "What if more people took that attitude...."
Person B: "Then it probably won't sell much and I won't buy it...."
Person A: 0.o...

I have never in my life heard that as a reason not to buy a game, a console   (both the cube and the virtualboy) perhaps but not a game. reasons ive heard not to buy a game, the demo blew, the cover system is annoying as hell, the AI is dumb as a tone of bricks, the game crashes constantly,  the game though it looks cool is unintuitive and highly repetitive, the controls for this game make you want to snap the handheld/controller in two    (for the love of god why are there not two nubs on the psp)

I understand its sarcasm, but for the life of me i hope people are not so stupid to only judge games on sales, and that the people who are, are too dumb to know what the sales are 

but maybe i expect too much of people 

While the conversation is exagerated there is no doubt casual browsers in stores look to the ranked titles, and a title that's selling well would imply it is good while a poorly selling title much further down the charts will imply it is not good.

I too assume everyone does research, reads reviews, and understands their own tastes, but of course this is a pretty weak assumption, and any time spend perusing a game store shows how many purchases are impluse or on the recomendation of friends.

agreed.

those who use sales to make A better than B are not proper gamers but are rather nerds.

oh devs are working for free now ? cool

Yeah. We can all buy used and pirated games with no remorse since sales are not important as of now :)

I agree. 

Often they just try to make "quality", and they define quality by THEIR OWN opinion.  So they end up with a game that they a few thousand fans, find awesome, and everyone else ignores, or finds it bad, and they call it "art".

It still makes more sense to buy a game because millions of other gamers liked it, than buying it because 20-30 journalists liked it, though...

The ideal would be somewhere inbetween, if people would try to inform about the games' style and genre first, and if they like that kind of games, choose the more popular one.