| Sandbox games, so you can remove StarCraft and Neverwinter Nights from the equation. You can also remove The Sims from the equation for the reason I mentioned above.
Sim City, Railroad Tycoon or Theme Hospital are certainly successful, but Spore is more like Sim Earth or/and Sim Life on sterroid. Two games that certainly did not went down in history as great commercial successes. The problem is that the budget of Spore is prolly a hundred times (if not a thousand times) the one of an early 90s game like Sim Earth.
I guess you can interest more people through huge buzz and marketing though. After all, Black & White sold close to 2 million copies. How many will still be there to buy Black & White 2 remains to be seen though. That will be an interesting test. |