Comment on PS5 Exclusive Saros Has Reportedly Only Sold 300K Copies
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoThis is the only gaming space I’ve encountered on the internet that has this many people unaware of Saros’ existence. The prevailing theory elsewhere for its lack of success is launching at $70, only on PS5, and people having already bounced off of its predecessor, Returnal. There aren’t 130 outlets reviewing the game because no one is reading them.
M0oP0o@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
What other gaming areas are you thinking of? Are they user driven for content and discourse like this?
And there are 130 outlets reviewing the game because they are in the business of reviewing games and this one was a rare exclusive for the ps5. It would be odd if they did not review it (and give it questionably high marks). If you look at a game like xenonauts 2 that also came out recently that sold about the same number of copies (very odd since one is very niche) they only have 14 critic reviews vs 130. The issue is the critic reviews clearly don’t hold the same value to consumers as they once did.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That is not made by clear by comparing those two games the way we just did, no. Game review and news outlets cover the games most likely to be of value to their audiences, partially because they foster that with their own interest, and partly because the data tells them what their audience is reading or watching. Saros got 130 different outlets reviewing it because it’s generally seen as a big deal for their audiences. Xenonauts 2, not so much, which is why it was only covered by 1/10th as many publications. We’re here on Lemmy because we’re more likely to leave a thing we don’t like even if we’re used to it, like reddit. If you don’t like traditional games media, fair enough, but I don’t think either that preference or our choice of being on Lemmy is representative of broader trends. I was just at a board game night where we had to give clues about Sabrina Carpenter, and I knew nothing about her. It doesn’t mean her publicist is bad at marketing; it means I’m not the target audience for it.
M0oP0o@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Have to vehemently disagree with this, it is clear that their coverage is not dictated by the value their audiences receive but from other more corporate values. And as time goes on the media coverage on games has less and less valued. It has nothing to do with my option on the media but my observations on the industry. The reason I brought up zenonaughts 2 was that it has 1/10 the reviews but similar sales, and that is indicative of the clear decline of the main stream gaming review system not having the pull it once did.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It is very much not clearly indicative of that. It has 1/10th of the reviews because it is expected to be relevant to far fewer people than Saros. The audience tends to value games that they’ve had marketed to them, which is a correlation for what should be obvious reasons.