I never said differently. What I said was that there were several ways to judge a product, one of which is number of players.
I proved no such thing. Again, I said there were several ways to judge a product. Naughty Dog could be an easy example of that. Suppose someone made a mobile shovelware game that was able to reach 10 million more players than TLoU2. If you only look at it from a number of players angle, then by that criteria the mobile game is the more successful product, but it would be reductive to only look at it from that angle.
TLoU2 will have people begging for sequels, remakes and have discussions about it again and again over the years. The theoretical mobile game was just there at that time. It didn't represent much aside from reaching a certain number of players and another shovelware title might as well have taken it's place instead. No one is committed to it as franchise, no is asking for sequels or remakes and you wouldn't be seeing people discussing the finer points of the shovelware title, like you will for decades with TLoU2.
Number of players is just one way to judge the success of a title.
This is not the point I'm making. I haven't said anything like that. I was talking about how there's several ways to judge a product.
I would consider it an abject failure from many angles, if Naughty Dog ended up doing games like the theoretical mobile shovelware mentioned above, even if it had more players than their other titles. It would be a loss to the industry.
My response wasn't an attack on you (and I do realize that a couple of lines there do sound like it was, apologies). I do not disagree with you that there are infinite ways to judge a game or studio and its success. Indeed, that IS the core of my argument. Treat my post as primarily support for these statements:
If you really want to piss people off, remind them that before Sea of Thieves, Kinect Sports was Rare's most successful title from both a sales and number of players perspective. People that say Rare is only a shell of themselves since being purchased by MS are just wrong.
It is like the people saying that Sega no longer really has anything but Atlus, when both Football Manager and the Total War series are actually bigger deals than anything Atlus does. They just aren't in the wheelhouse of many of this site's users.
On the other hand, just because a studio doesn't make the genre or type of game it used or that a person likes doesn't mean it's a shell of itself. Has the creativity changed? Quality? Still fun to play (maybe objectively)? Meaningful engagement? And whatever else.
I think in Rare's case all the above are true, if not more so.
I was using your response as jumping off point to discuss how these sorts of narratives start and propagate: we choose the rules or metrics by which we judge the past, but our choices are based on how think in the present. To then take those "results" and try to make a point about the present (such as when people, not you, say that Rare is "a shell of itself") seems like a foolhardy exercise, no?
For example, why is longevity of a franchise the key metric? Nobody was calling for more of God of War, then it became (regained its place as) perhaps the biggest Sony-owned IP overnight. Nobody is asking for a Shadow of the Colossus sequel. Does that not count? Well but then there was ICO and recently there was a great remake.. but it's not really the same and.. The Last Guardian.. Angry Birds and Candy Crush got more sequels than Uncharted - and they're ALL played by more people. You know what I mean? We can get deep into the weeds - there are a million caveats and whatever to twist and shape to our purposes. But ultimately, it's almost all confirmation bias one way or the other.
None are inherently more accurate nor more valid. So, don't we agree that the entire discussion is kind of meaningless and misguided? If hundreds of millions of people love mobile game Naughty Dog, who are we to decide that it's a loss to the industry? You and I would hate it and we can say that and hopefully we are heard. We on this forum can say we hate it, and that would be generally ok in this space. But surely, those people enjoying those games are people with valid opinions, too?
OTOH, if the shovelware is crap and everyone hates it and nobody plays it - then, yes, it's pretty straightforward to declare it a misstep. (Again, IMO player numbers DO matter, they're not everything or even the most important or best thing but they're relevant). But it's just very hard for me to square the idea that something is fervently beloved by people - and, in this case, more people than ever before - is bad or worse simply because they're
different people.
