Marketing is the biggest bitch in any media distribution nowadays. I personally think that even games with little to no marketing can be successful if good games. And that a dollar spend on marketing does, for the most part, not return the investment. But that is how the industry rolls.

Stated by a famous guy once, supported only by his personal opinion, and "god given fact" ever since...

That's about as good as, "Because Jesus said so in the Bible!"

They marketed so much because they somehow thought a game like Darksiders 2 could sell 10 million copies, which is completely indefensible fantasy.

I mostly agree, but only for 2nd+ game in well accepted series. Otherwise great games may end up unnoticed (Psychonauts say hello). But burning huge amounts of money so everyone and their dog knows about the game is insane.

Like anything else it's accepted because it makes sense to people and wouldn't have been if it didn't. There is no vast conspiracy there. A billion idioms die a painful death every year but you never hear about them.

Let me check if I said thay had some retarded management decisions....hm...yup, pretty sure I did. Nevertheless it did sell 3 million copies. And that's not small number by any means.
As I said already, restructuring, combined with.showing door to some morons in suits would/could.save the day, if they had any more money to spend to finish Metro, CoH2 and South Park.

The main problem with "AAA" development today is that these companies are spending money that DOES make 3 million seem like a small number. It's insanity.\

We don't really disagree by the way, as far as I can tell, I am just talking.

I don't really think Day Z and Minecraft are representative. Also I'm around here for quite some time, and I still have no clue wether are most of games in countless indie bundles any good as I never heard of most of them. Worst thing is I have no clue where to check, as Google mostly leads me nowhere on lesser known ones.

Even though they filed for Chapter 11, they have made $37.5million of the $50 million they need from investors.

Bad News. THQ were one of the good guys with really good games.

Seems most of the games in development are still going to be made.

http://i.imgur.com/DZXZa.jpg

High risk, high reward. It'll always be present at leading edge of an industry, at least for a while. I do agree though.

I wonder if AAA video game industry would be more stable if they copied the indie approach but linearly increased depending on budget, employees and potential assets.

I think everything is on the table again and they will recalculate every single project. Relic is owned by THQ and Company of Heroes a valuable IP and belongs to THQ. Metro is from an independent developer and the IP only used in license, same for Obsidian and the South Park Game. Maybe they will continue the development, maybe they will sell or cancel the games.

We both know that common wisdom is tested by science for good reason: it often proves common wisdom and "making sense" wrong.

The massive cultural bias of the time made an accurate assessment nearly impossible and things have not much changed in the US.

As an argument it's an appeal to an authority that was stating nothing more than opinion.

All I'm pointing out is it's a shitty argument with nothing of substance to back it up. People say it out of habit, but it doesn't lend it any more weight or authority than mere tradition grants to anything else.