Trap of Dissociated Feedback

Before we dive into composition of the phenomena, let's briefly mention other potential factors which also distort the feedback: Financials - most of the time we have no idea about the total money spent on specific game. And though we can have decent estimates in some cases, that is still far away from being reliable and scalable. Marketing budgets are staying in deeper shadows, and "collateral" expenses like taxes, debt obligations, currency changes are practically invisible without deep insights. This is important to remember, because it is fairly easy to make a 1000 reviews game, spending 20 million on it, but supposedly it is not recouping. On the other hand some might pull off a game spending only a year of solo-dev time, and get 500 reviews, which is more likely to be a financial success. Strategy - We have little-to-no ideas about goals of developers/publishers which they set for a specific release. For one that might be a start of a new IP 10-year plan, for another it can be pure thorough game-design experiment, others might even build a game to "sell" a team to a bigger publisher, proving they are capable of producing. Influencers - impact of a decent-sized influencer affecting your game cannot be underestimated, but can easily slip out of focus when we analyze something. Well, humans are still humans, some people enjoy games, and can suddenly mention your game publicly, which in a way provides a positive-bias, on top of popularity. This, in fact, includes different "awards" and other conferences, the effect of which can be observed with the Baldur's Gate 3 example. Trends - descriptions and tags, as well as overall "image" of your game can set a bias towards your game. Good simple example is how perception of "souls-like", "rogue-like", and "battle-royal", "VR" is drifting across time. There were years where almost every VR game hit the "above average" success, there are years where VR is hitting way below average. At worst - you can face the "down-trend" and just be ignored/bombed, at best - get sudden crushing wave of positive reviews, even though you just "copied" existing solutions. For our feedback problem it distorts temporal patterns, making it harder to tell apart "good game" and "suddenly popular game", sometimes more, sometimes less.