Counter example - the fighting game genre, which with SFII (I know there were fighting games that came before it) became increasingly complex and technical and thereby "hardcore" and alienated a lot of the more casual players (if anyone who who played fighting games can be called that in the first place).

diablo 3.... epic downgrade from diablo 2

When developers start making changes based on QQ games don't have much time left

I don't think Riot has fallen into the "We know what players want" category yet, a constantly recurring theme in Morello's post is "We don't know what you want, we need to get better at communicating"

Anyhow, games that have disappointed me in that regard usually fail for other reasons, and I'll take a game trying to guess what the playerbase wants anyday over a game that's not interested at all in what the playerbase wants.

Tales of Symphonia 2.

So much wasted potential. Game was obviously rushed and unfinished and the storyline made me cringe.

Rumor has it Visceral Games is going all out on staffing for a new moba game.

Anyone ever play Phantasy Star Online before?


Sega has failed at a sequel to that for almost 10 years now. And their new one is just a stupid F2P cash cow attempt. The death of a great IP, i tell you man...i used to get the most random people completely hooked on that game on campus....


Which isn't surprising. Sega's been screwing up Sonic the Hedgehog for WAYYYY longer than Phantasy Star.

call of duty, world of warcraft, battlefield 3.

Q: Why do Game Developers think they know what the players want?

Simple answer : Alot of times, They don't.


There is only a few companies that i can say REALLY (in 2013) still understands what their fans want, and even when they deviate from the norm they are still MASSIVELY successful from almost every spectrum of the fanbase.



Nintendo is one of them. With the exception of Metroid: Other M (Team Ninja ****ed that up) I cannot recall a single core title of Nintendo's that has flopped.


Namco is another one, specifically the Tekken series. Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is almost just universally a wonderful game. Capcom on the other hand constantly churns out unbalanced garbage (MvC3, SFxT), and the last one they did was SO BAD that people just stopped playing the damn game because of its rep.

So NOW they're rebalancing the game.

Borrderlands 2, Gearbox was like "Hey, what made Borderlands so loved? Let's do none of that, but make it look the same on the surface. Also, we should totally buttr*pe single player to force multiplayer. Then we won't release any of the content we hyped up in development, and never fix bugs."

I really don't understand at what point it became wrong to make a sequel just like in predecessor. I was under the impression that was the whole damn point of sequels. 6 Megaman games on the NES, all the same, nobody complained once. That's how it's done.