I should really make this a weekly column.  Material is so easy to come by.

Today, while reading Kotaku, I came across a post entitled “Rare: Shut Up, Kameo And PDZ Sold A Ton.”  Kotaku reference’s an interview posted on Videogamer.com in which Senior Software Engineer Nick Burton at Rare ironically expresses an issue with the game media and their perception and definition of hit games.  He says:

“One of the things that I always find funny is when people always quote Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero as being flops at the launch of the 360. In the industry if you break even you’re lucky, you’re in the minority. If you make a decent amount of money you’re really in the minority. You’re in the top percentile. Those two games made a lot of money. For the install base they sold phenomenally well. Kameo is still selling now.”

He makes a very good point.  This happens with the Wii all the time, but it’s not exclusive to Nintendo.  Remember the articles like Boom Blox a Bust at Retail?, which were based on first week sales of the game?  Six weeks later, it had sold 450,000 copies, to the gaming media’s complete and utter shock.  And you have games like Carnival Games whose weekly sales actually increased over time.

But the thing that really set me off was Kotaku’s response to the quote.  Rather than learn something from it, like maybe every game doesn’t have to sell 3.8 million copies the first week like Halo 3to be successful, Kotaku decides to make a snarky comment about the last sentence, about how Kameo still selling now.  Their pearl of gaming wisdom?

“Who the hellis still buying Kameo?”

Seriously, it’s comments like this that really make me wonder from what grade school they dug up some of these “gaming journalists.”  Who the hell bought Kameo nearly two years after launch?  Maybe it was some the 220,000 people that only just bought an Xbox 360 last month!  Not everyone bought a console at launch.  Not everybody wants to spend $50-$60 on a new title.  Kameo got a 79 metacritic score!  Is that bad?

The gaming press treat game quality as if how good a game is deteriorates over time.  I played through Resistance: Fall of Man last week for the first time, after the game became a Greatest Hits title on the PS3.  Was it supposed to not be a quality title anymore, because it was originally released at the end of 2006?  Did the 86 metacritic score it got in 2006 drop to a 35 now that it’s summer of 2008?

I’m sure that the intent of the comment, other than to be snarky and too cool, is to say that there are other better titles out now than when Kameo came out at launch.  Well not everyone gets review copies of games before they hit the store shelves.  Not everybody has the budget to buy the 6-8 good software titles that come out on average each month.  The gaming media has such a “this is nice, but what comes out next?” mentality.  Game companies don’t.  Greatest Hits programs wouldn’t exist if they did.  The gaming press thinks “Who would buy that old junk?”  Apparently, it’s the public at large.  There are even whole communities like Cheap Ass Gamer dedicated to finding good prices on all games, new and old.

Until gaming journalists start thinking like John Q Public, they will continue down the path of irrelevancy, even as the market trends towards the mainstream.