Could be an echo effect. 90% of people don’t really pay attention to gaming media or hate trains - they just see a cool new game in stores while most of their attention is elsewhere.

The “echo” element would be that if most of their knowledge of gaming is from playing things, not reading about them, they may decide “Wow, Sony usually makes great stuff, but last one I bought wasn’t great. I may sit this out.” I sort of saw that with Assassin’s Creed Unity / Syndicate. Unity was shitty and released with terrible bugs, but Syndicate was sort of okay - and Syndicate was the one that saw lots of lost sales.