Actually I thought about number of installations. One could even include total playing time or total fun gained. In all these measures I am sure Skyrim has beaten Witcher 2.

Regarding money: I have more faith in our economic system. After all money allows to me buy the things I like most and it's an incentive for the companies to produce more things of what I like. All in all it works quite well.

Well, when you consider the number of people that are used to create a game, this will happen sooner or later. I mean, take a look at the credits of some of the latest games. They go on and on and on and on.

And I find pretty funny the fact that a game like Assassin's Creed Revelations had employed 7 different writers while a movie like Inception only had one writer, who also doubled as director and producer. One has to wonder whether they hire people out of charity rather than actual need.

No no NO ! You can't run an industry whose heartbeat is CREATIVE according to purely commercialistic goals ! For God's sake, please try to learn that economics is not the be-all and end-all of everything. The whole universe does not dance to the tune of the law of supply and demand, and anything creative / artistic CERTAINLY doesn't dance to this shitty boring tune !

I can't BELIEVE the stupidity of your first "argument" ! You are trying to CALCULATE (lol) which games ought to be created in terms of how much enjoyment they produce in terms of time spent playing a game .... This has got to be one of the most retarded and repulsive opinions I have seen recently anywhere on the internet. You are trying to guide the direction of the creative imagination by means of economic analysis ???

Edit : Epic sense of humour fail by me.

Two games spring to mind. Tomb Raider 2013, a AAA game by any standards, looked good, polished gameplay etc. It "flopped" in the eyes of its publishers cos it "only" sold something like 4 million.

Enslaved, well produced, graphically enticing, slick controls, great facial animation (Andy Serkis sp?) and interaction between the characters. I think at the time it only sold something like 90 thousand copies.

I think the biggest failure was Enslaved, it was well advertised (well it was here anyway), had a well known backstory (Journey to the West), but jeebuss.... only 90 K sold!!??

While I dont particularly like platformers, selling only 90k copies of that game wasnt a failure, it was an absolute travesty and I place the reason entirely on gamers. It could possibly be called "the best game never played".

So, while gamers keep ponying up for CoD and other sequel drones, quality games like Enslaved get ignored, so, basically our future will be games like CoD, GoW, Battlefield and assorted sports games (nothing wrong with any of them btw), milking their audience for DLC maps and personalised servers and all only being sold in chain stores like WalMart, Tesco's etc. because HMV, Gamestop (spit) and GAME etc. will be gone (largely due to their own fault of ripping off consumers for 2nd hand product priced at nearly the "new" full price game).

We have a store here called SMYTHS, its kinda like Toys R Us, I have a mate working there and he says nobody is trading in, or buying 2nd hand games anymore, all thats selling (new product) are the big names mentioned above and DS games.

Imagine, Tescos will be deciding what games I can choose from on the high street..... crikey it doesnt bear thinking about. :(

Any Capcom published game which was developed by an external studio is a failure. LP3 won't escape this sad fate.

The DmC reboot was good, but then again, Ninja Theory is an awesome dev studio, as any longstanding PS3 gamer will tell you.

Edit: And if by coincidence, F1ach mentions Enslaved two posts above.

You're still trying to quantify it in financial terms, which is wrong. A game that is enjoyed by 10,000 can be just as successful as a game that is enjoyed by 5,000 to the same extent. The main thing is that the game reflects the developer's creative vision, is appreciated by its audience and is not compromised in any way by punishing deadlines or commercial interests.

Skyrim is a rare example of a game that was true to BethSoft's creative vision, but it suffered from the tight deadline problem. Look how buggy it was for the first six months, and look how the creative issues came to the fore in the long run.
Oh, are we going to get into the "It's not the original series so it's automatically a travesty" discussion again?

If so, you can stop right there.

What's a failure?
Didn't sell well? They try too hard to be somebody else, budgets are far too big and (quite possibly) misused. There is bound to be similarities in many games, that's iteration & innovation. If we wanted games that were 100% original, we'd be playing about 6 or 7 right now. But when they activley copy an entire game? No, stop.
Wasn't critically acclaimed? Buggered if I know. Because of how subjective the whole reviewing process is, it's hard to know the standard
Wasn't well received by gamers? Hell if I know, the fact a majority get so emotionally riled up about the most trivial things (PC Gamers are especially guilty of hyper-sensitivity and getting offended WAY too easily, remember the Borderlands 2 love letter?) to the point where it's like developers & publishers are actively committing war crimes. Plus I rarely regard the opinions of others with any weight (much of this came from the "No Steam, No buy" CONSUMErs, because they aren't customers, they're consumers, they CONSUME, they don't think about what they're doing, just mindlessly buy, buy, buy).

However, games I consider failures are ones I didn't enjoy playing. I don't consider the Arkham games failures, but I consider Darksiders a failure. I don't consider the Supreme Commander games or the DoW saga failures, but I do the original XCOM. But whatever, I'm just one guy.

Because the big publishers' managers are inept, greedy and just plain stupid assholes, mostly.

I tried to go away from financial terms. I would call it the demcratic approach - majority wins. If more people like and use one of two similar products, than this one could be seen as the better one.

I am not in a good position to judge on the quality of Skyrim or Witcher 2, because I played only one. Maybe the bigger marketing for one of them was the key factor to success. Such things happen. Anyway the original point was, that devs aren't capable of realistically comparing their own products to other products or to expectations of players. They just love their own pet most or they fail to have enough outside input or they choose to ignore outside input. I think this input is important and they should try to be as close as possible to the desires of their potential customers, of course without loosing their creative visions. A balance is needed.

Spending too much money on voice acting,flashy cutscenes,concentrating on way game looks and sounds rather than on actual fun gameplay (awful AI or gameplay mechanics).

I don't think so to both.
DMC arguement always leads to nowhere so it's easier to mention other flops: Dark Void, Lost Planet 2, Dead Rising 2, Bionic Commando, RE Raccoon edition etc.

Nor am I. But then, personal taste doesn't really come into it here. The critical factor is that Skyrim is the game that Bethesda made but Zenimax wanted. Witcher 2 is the game that CDPR made and CDPR wanted. CDPR made creative decisions that would widely be considered 'unwise' in commercial terms.

That being said, Skyrim was a comparative success in that it was still for the most part entirely under BethSoft's creative control. That's what made it a great game, as Dragon Age: Origins was under Bioware's control.

On the other hand, you only have to see games like Mass Effect 3. For me, this is an absolute disaster of a game, because it was solely developed with commercial interests in mind and quite obviously didn't reflect the creative wishes of its developers. Ironically, regardless of people's opinions on the ending, I would say that the ending was the most successful thing about the game, because it represented a victory of creativity (I believe it was wrriten by Jen Hapler?) over commerce. Everything else about that game was a perfect example of cynical commercialisation.
Except Ninja Theory didn't have anything to do with those flops?

Of course, if this is simply about hating on Capcom for hating's sake and that you feel that acknowledging that DmC was a good game somehow bizarrely dilutes the idea that the others were crap, then I don't know why we're having this discussion.

Besides, I rather enjoyed Bionic Commando and Dark Void. Not great games by any stretch, but still entertaining. Also: Bionic Commando: Rearmed and Dark Void Zero. Nuff said.

I presume that, in this context, failed games are those that fail to cover the cost of their own development and marketing. The flawed assumption that returns are directly proportional to investment is a factor here; to me it seems that money is used incredibly inefficiently in AAA game development.