Good point. I think there's room for the lower performing games to benefit from a longer tail as gamer word of mouth promotes them in the coming year. That's the "old school" type of marketing that can drive retail game sales without costing the publishers AAA money. We shouldn't paint good games as "failures" when they don't break the box office on opening, give them room to grow in the community. We'll probably be seeing a bunch of LTTP threads in the coming months on them.
Game sales are often so front-loaded than frankly, it'd be awkward for any publisher to put significant amounts of 'stock' into hoping a game has legs to recoup its profit, because most games don't.
And let's assume for the games that do have legs for growth. How do you achieve it?
The easy way to drive short-term growth is to drop to bargain bin prices, yet gaining sales through that measure doesn't guarantee the sequel will sell that amount you sold, if so many consumers are only willing to pay so much to buy that game.
And if you drop it marginally slowly, hoping for slow growth pace-by-pace, you risk your game not being 'worth it' 1 year down the line, when there's newer games at cheaper prices because you chose to be stingy about your price drops.
Minecraft/GTAV/CoD/FIFA legs are an anomaly in this industry. Even stuff like TLoU, where it manages to hit 8 million in a year, while maintaining a relatively decent price isn't common.
