That's exactly what happened with Dead Space: Extraction.  The game had tons of advertising and didn't make money, so it got a cheap guided first-person prequel with no advertising to try to recoup its losses.  Consumers saw through that scheme and didn't buy it.  If there's never another Dead Space game, I don't think anybody's going to complain.

Suda51 poured his personality into No More Heroes, it got a cult following, and was his most successful game ever, and is getting a sequel.  When somebody pours their personality into a game on any console, everybody wins.

The Kane and Lynch moneyhatting was a failure. It still got sucky reviews, and all it achieved was getting a perfectly good reviewer fired. Surely, if you're going to "put pressure on a reviewer by threatening to remove advertising", you might as well go all the way, like GTA4, right?

And why would EA suddenly choose to put pressure on reviewers for this game and not, say, Need for Speed Undercover? They probably never even thought Extraction would sell.

Arius Dion, your powers of agreement amaze me

This 100%

I thank you. 

Also, the picture in your sig is hilarious.

Strangely, the only game i may think about is 1st (2nd?) party: Disaster, Day of Crisis...

I still don't get why Nintendo has bought Monolith, to not even release their first Wii game in the US, and send it to die in PAL land: it wasn't a masterpiece, that's for sure, but the game was really decent, and fun... it was a good effort, and i'm sure it lost a lot of money...

The good news in this case is that the company may (very easily) loose some money on it, it isn't a small dev ruined after a big flop...

Now, if i look at all the other games i've bought or rented, which i all consider "quality games", i don't see many "real" flops... limited successes, yes, maybe, but Wii games don't always cost 10-20 millions or even a lot more, like most PS360 games, or most AAA Nintendo games...

Like many already said, Okami and No More Heroes did OK in regard to their limited budgets, and i'm sure even Mad World has sold enough to get the money back and do (minimal) profits... same for HotD Overkill, and RE4 did great, Umbrella Chronicles too... The Conduit? Well, i haven't played it, but maybe it was a flop, maybe... but did it really deserve to sell 5 or 10 times more?

De Blob did very fine, and even Elebits did enough to get a DS sequel... the 1st Boom Blox was a small hit, the 2nd one did poorly, but it was too much of the same, too early after the first one: if they could have waited and do it with WM+, many more gamers would have purchased the sequel...

Klonoa did poorly, too, but i don't think the budget for such a (cute) port was so high that it needed even 200k sales...

What's left in 3rd parties i've experienced?

Marble Madness and Kororinpa: i guess they were very cheap to produce... Pangya Golf: the first one did ok, the sequel, well, same thing as the Boom Blox sequel... Zack and Wiki: hard to estimate the budget for this one, but sales weren't THAT bad... maybe they just got their money back, maybe... even the guys at Capcom said many contradictory things about it... the Rabbids games did more than OK in regard to their quality, Super Monkey Ball had a good success for such a bad game, same thing for the first Red Steel, or Sonic and the Secret Rings...

The last one in the 3rd parties i've played so far: Little King's Story... i think it did fine, but such a game deserves 10 times more sales, to create huge profits for the guys who have made such a masterpiece... not a flop, "just" a niche success, just like Muramasa seems to do right now...

And that's it, for me at least... the situation isn't perfect, but the mainstream market is hard to catch, and most people don't buy 10/15 games a year, or even more like some of the guys we know on forums...

It's maybe sad, but there's nothing we can do about it: if you only purchase 3/4 games a year and have a Wii, the Nintendo games will always offer the best value, and the most guaranteed fun... and even we, "real gamers", "core gamers", "avid gamers", know that only a handful of 3rd party Wii titles have equalled their quality so far: how could we blame anyone?

Once again, your not reading.

They aren't putting pressure on anybody.  The pressure is ALWAYS there.  Reviewers KNOW if they badmouth too many EA games they're going to be losing the majority of their advertising money and will likely be out of a job. 

It's one of the big fears of internet journalism and "free" magazine journalism, and it's ramped up to the Nth degree when it comes to specialty publications like this.

Thank you.  Now I was going to say something intelligent before in this thread but I can't remember what it was.

I still need to beat Dead Space, from what I played, its fun, I'm a fan of lightgun games, but while Dead Space is alright it didn't thrill me too much, I tried to get excited and into it, but alas no avail, I wanted to play TMNT Smash Up but my friend I was playing Co-op with on Dead Space wanted to keep playing...

In all honesty TMNT is a much better game that has criminally low sales, Dead Space deserves to sell under it, TMNT has a balanced roster, made by a great team, the best online for a fighting game on Wii and just plain fun.

@ This thread: Really guys I see the normal guys that claim "Wii core game bombed it's terrible Wii can't sell core games" and then the Wii fans which would be apart of the core Wii crowd saying they didn't want an on rails Dead Space game, and they said that from the very moment the game was announced and said to be on-rails.

Really EA did everything in their power to make sure this game did not do well, they didn't make a game for their target crowd, pissed them off by saying DSE was a test game (basically made the threat "If you core gamers don't buy it don't expect good games from us again"), they alienated all the previous Dead Space fans, and the on-rails genre is a bit saturated.

I really don't see why there are so many issues on this topic, more or less it seems the sales of "core" titles on Wii seems to be the hot button much like how every game that people liked on Wii (and also sold well) had a million topics where the metacritic scores were shoehorned in there to pester people.

Wii gamers enjoy X game other gamers try to whine about the metascores. Wii gamers say they don't care for X game (and didn't sell well) others come in to say "CORE GAMEZ DONT S3LLL!" The cycle is old -_- people just need to drop it, good games don't always score well, good scoring games don't always sell well, and it's not like it isn't the same for each and every console/handheld that ever existed, games sell that can market to large crowds, and that has always been the case.

As I figured. HD game got a sequel because it flopped and wii game got a sequel because it was a succes.

Too bad that in dead space's case the developers could not use the stuff like engine and models they already created on original game, they had to make a new game. Which would indicate that they did not make the game because original game did not make money. Do you have any evidence suggesting that dead space did not make any profits with more than 1.5m sales?

NMH is another case. I don't know about it but I am pretty sure that game is using the same engine, models, rehashed art and so on. Which one of these games sound like a game made to recoup losses?

Funny, original dead space was an excellent game. I think a lot of people will be disappointed if there won't be a sequel. Just because you don't happen to like it does not mean everyone else agrees with you.

New Models, New art... additionally the no more hero guys said they made money, and threw a big party.

Deadspace may or may not have made money, it did underperform though, which is problematic since those funds were likely expected to recoup expenses or losses elsewhere.

HD games are like the movie industry.  Hits driven.  You need one megablockbuster so you can make back all the money you blew on the last 10.

Wii,DS and PSP games are like the indie movie industry.  Cheap, so cheap that you aren't going to break the bank, and any success is going to be big.  You can even end up with a giant blockbuster like success, like a big CGI laced movie but with much less costs.