Not always true, Diablo 3 inherit the goodwill from Diablo 2, hence making it very successful. But sales of it's expansion Reaper of souls is less impressive than Diablo 3 after the uproar. It took more effort, and discounts to win back the goodwill of the customers

http://www.usgamer.net/articles/diablo-3-reaper-of-souls-27-million-in-sales-shows-decline

Well I did say exactly as your first sentence. Unless my English sucked and didn't convey my intention well. xD

And xpac sales declined is for a reason. I've never seen an xpac selling above the main game sales.

That goes for WoW as well perhaps.

It's both. It's not acceptable and it is acceptable. Which one is correct for a given game depends on the person making the judgment call about it and what their personal expectations are. If a 3 hour game makes someone happy at a given price and they feel they've gotten their money's worth or they will get their money's worth out of it, then it's probably acceptable to them and that's what's "right" for them. Another person may feel that 3 hour long games are not interesting to them for what they personally hope to get out of a game and they may expect 8/20/50 hours out of a game and find a 3 hour game a disappointment. They're not wrong either, it may be unacceptable to them personally, and their decision may be to not buy that game, or to be upset about it if they bought it and found out it was only 3 hours long after the fact.

So there's nothing inherently wrong or unacceptable about a game being 3 hours long in and of it's own. Whether it is acceptable to an individual person is solely the decision of the individual to make for themselves and their right to make that judgment. It's very unlikely an entire population of people with diverse backgrounds, needs, preferences and expectations are all going to agree to like or dislike the same things afterall.

Having said that, I wont knowingly buy a game that is 3 hours long personally as I have no interest in short experiences like that. Or 6 hours long for that matter. My personal desire when it comes to games is for experiences that last much longer than that. No specific minimum number of hours as it varies by game genre what I'd like to get out of a game in terms of hours of value as well as by other factors. Whether this is me considering a 3 hour game unacceptable for me, or if for some reason someone disagrees with my free right to think that - then it's simply "I wont spend money on a game that is only 3 hours long". And that's something nobody can disagree with unless they put a gun to my head and force me to buy something I don't want. Even then I still have free choice. :)

Not sure how Diablo 3 is even relevant to all this. It is the best selling PC game of all time.

http://www.polygon.com/2015/8/4/9097497/diablo-3-sales-30-million-units

Ah yes you are correct, I did not read properly. Shame on me.

I read it as Unless your name is Blizzard with Diablo 3 to boot

Dark Matter. I was thinking the same thing.

I loved 1 and 2. This one just didn't look good at all.

I don't understand why people, after all these years, still think going 3D perspectives are superior to 2D. Gaming is about enjoyment, experience and art. Nowhere is there a mandate for FP or OTS views.

Oh well.

No fucking way. Even if it's just the steam numbers, there's no way that thing sold less than 500.000 .

It was refreshing to see how honest the developers were in their post about how the game ended up being much harder to make than they thought it would.

This part is a bit strange: "We have squeezed everything we could into the game, there's nothing left on the table. We initially had a much longer story written and more levels planned, but to create what we envisioned, it would have taken at least triple the money, probably up to 15 million USD, which we didn’t realize until too late, and which we didn’t have."

What they say is that with 5 million dollars you can only make a 6-7 hours game in 3D and they didn't realize it until it was too late (which was probably right at the beginning).

Now the questions are?

- Could they have seen it earlier? Maybe by being more professional.
- Could they have done without 3D but more content instead when seeing it earlier?
- Could they have asked and obtained more money when seeing it earlier?
- Could anyone else have squeezed more gameplay out of the 5 million dollars?

Maybe they were just inefficient?

I'm anyway not interested in the game, so it doesn't really matter to me.

However the part "I'm confident we'll get many issues fixed shortly (including some of the technical bugs and multiplayer problems). I apologize for those issues and I ask for your patience as we work those out. From our perspective the launch has been reasonably smooth on the tech side, we should be close to a good technical state in a short while." reminds me to never buy or play a game right after launch ever again since it seems that not even the devs expect games to be in a good technical state right at the launch but only some time after. And I really don't want to be the beta tester.

I think in this case it was more of a challenge kind of thing. Trying new things. Doing the same thing over and over again is kind of professionally stalling. They could have gone for a new ip or something, but doing a sequel always lessens the finantial risk.

Unfortunately, steamspy's data seems to be pretty accurate. So, yes. And it's not only grimrock 2, you can see the trend in that chart of pretty straightforward sequels for some well known indie games (TBOUT2 is very good too).

What I read into it is, basically, that the game bubble has burst. It had to happen, eventually. People started buying games just for the sake of it, with steam's rise and great discount prizes. But not everyone's a collector. And it comes a point where the backlog is just to big and they stop caring. If you add to that the exorbitant amount of releases per week, well, it gets overwhelming. Even for collectors. Which kind of takes people away from buying games (and generates the unfair reaction we're increasingly getting now against indie games)
I guess the what happened with crowdfunding (it's getting harder and harder to fund games that way) was not just about that practice in particular but about gaming buying habits in general.

There will always be hype induced dollar marketed popamole AAA record sellers, though.

l8r!

Personally the length is the least of the problem I have with the game.

The buggy physic engine, the camera issues, the lack of depth perception issues (resulting in numerous death), the lack of character progression, the grindy aspect, etc... are for me much bigger issues.