Perhaps we'll agree to disagree.
I see it a bit like force-feedback wheel support: the proportion of people impacted by omitting the feature would be minute, but devs put in the effort to support it anyway.
Neo support probably won't be a financial life-or-death decision for devs, but deciding to omit it is significant.
I hear you both and you both have valid points but I'm more in agreement with The God here.
I agree with you that the inclusion or absence of a Neo improvement can affect buying habits of certain consumers in situations where 2 or more games are
very similar.
Where I agree more with The God is that there are very few games that are
very similar these days.
Take FPS' for instance. Some may think that Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Titanfall are quite similar. If they all had a Neo mode and say Call of Duty's Neo mode wasn't quite as fleshed out as Battlefield or Titanfall, you're suggesting that there's a large population of people that could potentially forgo the following just because they perceive that the developers of Call of Duty didn't try hard enough:
-Where their friends are playing
-The quality of the gameplay itself
-Price (which in this example may be the same but in other examples could be different)
To ignore these other factors just because someone may feel slighted that the Neo mode of a game they are interested in isn't
as good as a competitor's is a stretch.
Certainly there will be some people who fall into this category. However, I do not believe any game will ever draw a large enough group of this type of consumer to make a notable impact on sales.
I used the Fall FPS market as an example because outside of driving games, it's one of the genres that produces the most similar games. The ideal example would have been sports games but because the vast majority of leagues around the world only produce one annual game, there is no competition there. Every other genre has increasingly
less similar games.
Tekken, Soul Caliber, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and King of Fighters are all fighting games but vastly different from one another. The likelihood of a large group of people who would've purchased one of these games but didn't because they didn't think the Neo mode went far enough is exceedingly small.
I could go on with other examples like first-party games, open world games, RPGs, almost anything from Japan, etc., but I hope the point is clear.
Yes, you're right that some people may fall into this category. However, I disagree on the amount of these people being anything significant.