I do not really understand why people care so much that games sell really well. I do not require 1,000,000 other people to own a game in order for me to enjoy it. Sure huge sales may help it get a sequel. However, many games that sell far less still get sequels and then go on to enjoy long life-spans as people find out about the series and explore the previous titles.



In a recent blog entry by J. Holmes I sort of became frustrated reading others’ comments. Aside from the usual Wii gathers dust in the closet and is only played by children, housewives and the elderly crock, that I find to be 100% untrue in my personal experience as all Wii owners I know are 16 to 40 year old males that primarily enjoy “hardcore” or 1st party titles, I digress, a lot of the conversation seemed to revolve around a mentality that good games should sell well, and if they did not they were, in a manner, delegitimized .
I find this dynamic of gamers on the internet being overly concerned with game sales very interesting, especially since it is such a stark contrast with my personal experience in life. Already my roommate and I are usually the most informed about the industry of all of our buddies, but generally, none of us could really give a rats ass about anything other than whether or not a game in question is fun or not. Occasionally discussions will be had about certain developers or contrasting one system with another, but we are not economists or businessmen and could not care less other than the fun factor of titles.

When I do find things out about sales it utterly baffles me about what companies do in response to them anyhow. One of my personal favourites of the last generation, Soul Calibur II, sold the most copies on the Gamecube, yet Namco decided to turn around and put Soul Calibur III on the PS2 exclusively. That was a real blow my buddies and I in high school that all owned either cubes or XBOXs.

Anyway, on the internet or at least my usual watering holes, it seems that unless a game sells well, or extremely well it is, as I said before for lack of a better word, delegitimized. The mentality seems to be that: if it really is amazing it will sell units like a Halo, Super Mario, Resident Evil, Madden, Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, GTA, Zelda title would.



I have never really thought about it before but there are two studios, Grasshopper and Platinum/Clover, that release games that of the ones that I have played I really enjoy. To my knowledge neither studio has released a game that has sold terribly well. Viewitful Joe, Okami, Madworld, No More Heroes and Killer 7 are all really great titles, in my opinion. Yet, they have all had a stigma for selling poorly. I find the casual and hardcore characterisations to be quite ambiguous and unintelligent in the first place but it appears that games that appeal to the hardcore audience are typically niche titles, rather than blockbuster sellers. Or if play time or devout interest is the matter at hand, I have seen people be far more interested and invest far more time and effort in “casual” things like Rock Band, Animal Crossing, Wii Sports etc than I usually do in Deadspace, Resident Evil (well maybe not RE that is kind of a way of life for me now), and Zelda.



Applying this to the casual-hardcore debate, I think Halo and Madden could be considered casual titles...

--- And don’t attribute that to “He’s a Nintendo fan he’s biased.” I loved Combat Evolved and playing Halo multiplayer when I get the chance...Sports games just fucking suck ass---



... they have sold a lot more titles than most things out there and most people I know who play either series do so only once in a while. In fact the more I analyse the casual-hardcore divide the more I realise that its a shoddy attempt to divide gamers by fan-boys, analysts and people within the industry who have something to gain by it. Actually, these are probably the same people who care about game sales due to their own personal biases actually, which in turn gives those of us that care about game-play instead of sales numbers, but still go out there and want to find out more about the industry and whatnot, lots of headaches.

Now that I draw this to a close I find that one of two things has just happened, either I just made a great personal realisation or I am a complete dolt for trying to rationalise the god damn internet.