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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

>> Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells,

That is exactly how I perceived the game industry to be before I worked in it. Now I know that there are many objectively excellent or even innovative or influential games that do not sell, or also do not sell well enough to support their development costs.

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Could you give an example of something excellent and either innovative or influential that did not sell well? It’s a question I have sought to answer myself. Especially if you can find one that doesn’t take development costs into account.

So I’m looking for an “objectively” (figuratively) excellent game, that has not sold many copies at all. A game on steam that should be popular but isn’t. Do you have any examples?

I’ve worked on a bunch of games that have been canned despite being crafted with love and innovative in their own ways. It’s not enough to just be well crafted, especially if you need to pay the salaries of 10 people for 1-2 years to make the game.

To cite one, Okami, innovative gameplay, striking art very poor sales, they made most of their sales after the fact after the studio closed and the game got ported to other systems than the PS2.

Commenting just so I can check later what he comes back with.

Wildgate

Sorry I did not reply with an example earlier, but InvaildorTaken just provide a perfect one. I was talking to some of the creators of this game last week. They are the people who made some of the biggest hits at Blizzard. They are super proud of that game and IMO it's really good. You can nitpick it, but you can nitpick hit games too.

Did not sell enough to justify the cost.

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