I feel like Endo Punk is fighting a battle entirely in his mind.
This is a completely normal and common reaction to fairly divisive, usually short, low-reception/sales games. There are dozens of LTTP Ryse threads, hundreds of pages on debates of how under/over/whateverrated it is. This happens to every single divisive game, from all parts of the spectrum. We still discuss God Hand in the same way. We still discuss Deadly Premonition, Driveclub, and many, many more. This whole discussion is tantamount to the pregnant couple that "sure is seeing a lot of pregnancy articles lately in newspapers!" just because they just so happen to be paying more attention to them.
Check your confirmation bias at the door.
With respect to sales -- it seems clear that The Order is a sales failure. That much, given what I would expect the budget to be, is a fairly straightforward, uncontroversial statement.
The discussion that's falling to the wayside, though, is how, conditional on the money spent so far and the technology developed a sequel or a brand new IP with similar tech by the same dev should be greenlit or not. Basing that decision strictly on the reception and sales of the first game completely ignores the relevant cost analysis that goes into a decision like this, and we are getting lost on the ridiculousness of discussing the perception of "defense forces" for different games, rather on focusing on what's actually relevant information for this point.
