It's not a black/white situation. It's not "All AAA games should sell 1 million+, all other games deserve 0 copies". Yes, shitty games deserve to sell fewer copies than good games. Everyone gets this. What we don't get is why 6/10, 7/10, and 8/10 games are all selling fewer than 50,000 copies lifetime and people are responding to this with "SHOULD HAVE MADE A 9/10 GAME! SHOULD HAVE MADE A 10/10 GAME!"
Shinobi PS2. Released in 2002. Solid 6.5-7.5/10. 200k+ copies sold
Victorious Boxers PS2. Released in 2000. Based on a B-grade licence, 7.5/10 or so game. 300k+ copies sold.
Unlimited Saga PS2. 2002. Piece of shit. 440k copies sold.
Battle Stadium DON GCN. 76k
Doshin the Giant GCN. 118k
SIMPLE SERIES DS VOLUME 1: MAHJONG. 33k Released before the DS exploded, no dev time, no unique qualities at all, poor reviews, and not even that cheap. Still running laps around SCL. When Simple series is outselling you, you know you have a major problem.
QuickSpot DS. 117k.
Oneechanbara vorteX Xbox 360. 18k.
Bullet Width Xbox 360. 16k.
Comic Party Dreamcast. 77k
Derby Time PSP. 70k.
WTF PSP. 50k Basically a tenth rate WarioWare knockoff. No budget, no marketing.
The PS2 has 7 Pachi-Slot games that have broken 200k. These are categorically awful, and there are literally trillions of them on the market.
Yeah, if developers released nothing but AAAA titles with multi-million marketing budgets, they'd do well. They shouldn't have to. Even 6/10 and 7/10 games with no marketing deserve to sell better than 10k.
Furthermore, given that some of these games are only selling through 30% of their admittedly pathetic shipment numbers, we have cases of companies expecting their software to bomb, and having it bomb even harder than they expect. That's truly awful, when a company says "Well, this is going to tank" and it proceeds to tank harder than anyone could ever imagine.
I think what will happen is similar to the DS. It'll be a combination of 3rd parties producing higher quality games and the market starting to buy more games, even the 6/10 and 7/10 ones.