Are Gamers The Stupidest Consumers Alive?

NEWS

August 1st, 2011 by Jeff Gates

Are Gamers The Stupidest Consumers Alive?

Sales charts for the past week reveal how moronic gamers can truly be. The fact that fitness and music games have a comfy spot in the weekly sales charts is something we can forgive, but Call of Juarez: The Cartel? That game is bloody awful!

The whole world should be embarrassed that this game (Hooked: 4.3/10 - Metacritic: 47/100) is anywhere near a top 10. The UK should be feeling the humiliation the most, as The Cartel is No. 1 in sales on both the Xbox 360 and PS3. It stands at No. 7 (on all platforms) in the Americas and No. 13 in the world.

In all honesty this is the kind of thing that makes developers and publishers alike think it's okay to put out sub-par product. At the end of the day it;s a business, and Ubisoft is getting rich off of us right now.

They sold 42k units in their first week. Did you know that is only 8k less than Halo: Reach and just 15k shy of Call of Duty 4? Does it in any way deserve that distinction? It doesn't really fall into the category of shocker, or something that might dumbfound people, but this is absolutely a head scratcher. It's almost as if gamers have some major malfunction going on. Is it that we don't use the internet? Of course not. Perhaps we don't pay attention to news or reviews, but of course we must, you did land here didn't you? So then, is it really that we are just stubborn? Many might argue that its an isolated incident caused by a minority of players but in reality it happens a lot. Just not as often with games this bad or in a genre populated by so many non-casual gamers.

When Zumba outsells a great game it's overlooked simply because that has become common place. However, when a game of the caliber of Call of Juarez manages to do the same thing, we must probe for a reason. To be honest the reason seems fairly simple: gamers are suckers.

We see guns, remnants of the old west, and cleavage and we all dive-in head first. Not even stopping for a moment to find out if the game is any good before we spend our hard earned money.