What makes a game sell?

Slashdot is proving to be a very fruitful source of gaming links today. First there was the link to the article about the psychology of achievement in games and now another interesting link to a Gamasutra article about the most important factors in game purchases.

Most important factors (in order or importance):
1. Genre (makes sense)
2. Whether or not they enjoyed a previous game in the series (Groan. FIFA 2099 here we come)
3. Price (Hurray!)
4. Word of mouth (one assume this involves all kinds of personal communication including online)
5. Advertising visuals. (You just gottta have explosions in it - period)

Factors having relatively little importance:
Publisher reputation (There are publishers out there who have anything other than a bad reputation?)
Metacritic scores (In my experience aggregated review scores are a reasonable if not perfect indication of quality. Pity to see that gamers pay so little heed when choosing where to spend their cash. The article does admit that word of mouth, which is important, is also related to quality so all hope is not lost )

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