nintendo consoles always have a handful of first party things that everyone buys because everyone knows what it’s going to be and there’s a relatively consistent design ethos there. it’s just not really been the case for almost anything else. especially the PS1 which was a wild and wonderful landscape in a lot of ways… but before FF7 came along there wasn’t really one identifiable game that came out for it. and if you’re someone who is going to play 10-15 games at most per console anyway, if those 10 or 15 games are likely either goldeneye or nintendo first party games that you’re pretty sure you know what you’re gonna get with, then that’s what you’re gonna know.
also i definitely followed review scores in magazines. even if i didn’t buy the magazines i’d look at the reviews and know what scored well. and those reviews definitely favored first party nintendo games. i think those had some influence.
is there a standard example of a game that is “critically acclaimed” but still sells poorly? i feel like video game critics as a whole are less out of step with popular taste than film critics, and yet (as far as i know) film critics don’t catch nearly as much shit for “incorrect” review scores
I would tend to look at ambitious western AA sequels as fitting into that category lately - Hitman 2, deadfire, pathologic 2, titanfall 2, etc. it’s tricky with games because there’s so rarely any kind of real observed risk in aiming for a more-than-modest success and you almost need a sequel for it to even critically register as a hedge; usually it’s rationalized away as assuming market conditions that didn’t exist, or gets swallowed up into guaranteed-money big budget stuff.
it comes to mind mostly because I loved all of those games and they are also some of the only games that I can remember hearing about having lost a significant amount of money
If video games had an Armond White whoever published them would be under constant threat of terrorist attack, especially if they were indexed on meta critic
I don’t think this is a case of Nintendo fans warping the discourse and more that Banjo Kazooie is a solid game that features a lot of historically necessary experimentation, and croc is worse than any of it’s PSX contemporaries that get talked about a ton like Crash Badicoot and Spyro which have been discussed just as much as Banjo over the years.
actually had more fun w/ croc than croc 2. croc 2 controlled like a normal platformer so it was more obvious it wasn’t a great game while croc 1 you could literally have him control like a car with an accelerator button and i knew there was something special about that, even at the time.