Anticipation (2/46)
To start, let's be more formal with terms. What is anticipation? How do we measure it and what are we even discussing here? Let's cherry-pick some games and try to find something that unites them. Game Reviews Steam Rating Monster Hunter Wilds 289k 45% Hollow Knight: Silksong 297k 85% ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN 146k 80% InZOI 25k 75% Borderlands 4 67k 60% Dune: Awakening 28k 69% Doom: The Dark Ages 25k 85% Mecha BREAK 28k 59% Avowed 25k 75% Killing Floor 3 10k 47% Broken Arrow 29k 51% Try to guess what's similar about those games? I guess I kinda spoiled that at the start, but you guessed it right - all of them are from top 30 wishlisted games on Steam back at the start of 2025. Monster Hunter was the #1 game overall and yet it sits around 45% now and lost 97.5% of its active player base in 2/3 of the year (by CCU). Avowed, a game from well-respected Obsidian Entertainment, sits at only 10k reviews with 75% positive. I asked myself - what's wrong with those games? Is there anything wrong at all with them? And yet one can answer easily - the developer did a poor job making the game, it's easy - you create a good game, you receive good feedback, you create a bad game, you receive bad feedback, it's that simple - I will argue and prove later in this article that there is something deeper happening. But right now we just see - people are getting disappointed with games they anticipated more than others would expect. This clearly doesn't cover all anticipated games, but for a given list of games feels counterintuitive. Let's remember that and keep moving.
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