Whenever somebody is criticizing a popular game, without fail there's another person dismissing their criticism with "But it sells well!", and most of the time they do it knowing it's a shit argument. For example, in a GTA VI thread from today we had this a lot regarding the quality of Rockstar's writing, with variations of the same "but muh sales" argument repeated ad nauseum because some people really just... couldn't argue normally without resorting to "people like it so it's good".
There's times where this argument holds weight, like when people complain about Nintendo games not dropping in price, or when discussing if people enjoyed a game, but most of the time it's used to just dismiss the criticism of a game the users in question personally like. It's a bad faith argument, hell I think it even counts as ad populum? Seems kinda obvious to have to say it, but a game selling well doesn't mean anything other than it sold well and that people probably like it. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
There's times where this argument holds weight, like when people complain about Nintendo games not dropping in price, or when discussing if people enjoyed a game, but most of the time it's used to just dismiss the criticism of a game the users in question personally like. It's a bad faith argument, hell I think it even counts as ad populum? Seems kinda obvious to have to say it, but a game selling well doesn't mean anything other than it sold well and that people probably like it. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
