But it can't be done in any kind of consistent way- you just keep saying it like it's a fact and it's not at all. What's the formula? What % of people who buy a game leave a review? If there's no formula, it's just anecdotical and no better than, "well none of my friends bought it, so it was a flop". That's not how logic or math works. Not to mention DTG have the actual sales figures, and the actual profit margins for each one. If Matt says Clinchfield (for example) didn't sell, i have to believe him because i don't have access to the data that could contradict his statement. It could even mean "it didn't sell enough to recoup dev costs because of an unexpectedly tough dev process. We had to hire an extra coder for it", or something similar, which, again, we have no way of determining. And, once again, i still don't understand the angle you think they're taking: 1. DTG release Route of type X, it sells well and makes a profit. 2. For some unknown reason, DTG decide to deceive their fanbase by telling them, "sorry, no, it didn't sell well after all, we're not making Routes of Type X anymore". 3. DTG move on to Route Type Y and the community rages. But, DTG must have wanted to make Route Type X at some point, or they never would have made it in the first place. And, so, if it was successful, why would they then immediately trash it? If it was because of customer criticism, wouldn't it be easier to just use the profits from the success of Route Type X to improve your product rather than engage in a ridiculous conspiracy to lie your way out of it? Or are you just saying new leadership changes dev priorities- cause that i can agree with! But it doesn't necessarily make it nefarious. But the other stuff, I just don't see it, man.
Again, I posted links to articles and social media discussion on the topic. It's very simple: Route Type X is less profitable than Route Type Y. However, this does not necessarily mean "it didn't sell well". Rather, it could also have sold slightly less than Route Type Y, or in fact sold more than Route Type Y but cost more to make to the extent that it made less money. However, saying this does not sound good, so instead DTG says that "it didn't sell well". Er, for starters DTG have shown very little inclination to fix their content.
It's sort of like the old joke "I don't understand how Jones got elected. I don't know anybody who voted for him"
I only skimmed the articles/threads you linked so forgive me if I'm misreading here but would you agree that what you linked shows a correlation between the number of reviews to the number of sales, not the review score (i.e. how well received the game is by the players or reviewers who left a review) vs number of sales? If so that seems very reasonable to me. If we assume a fraction of players leave a review, and this fraction is relatively constant, then it stands to reason that the more reviews a game has the more sales it has (on average). I think what DTG Matt meant (and please correct me if I'm wrong) was that, in his experience, the review score doesn't correlate very well to the number of sales. Anyway, thanks for taking the time to collect those sources
Definitely no correlation between number of sales and review score, in fact some times it's opposite to what you'd expect. However I often find that if you just take Steam reviews into account - often more popular (in terms of sales) products have fewer reviews, so again i'm still not inclined to read anything into it, I don't find anything reliable in review score nor review counts. I suspect DLC performs differently to core games in many respects as regards how you review it etc? Not sure. Just know that in my experience, it's simply not useful - I have no knowledge of other games of course Matt.
