Kusagari said:
Nobodies saying the hardcore fans didn't pick it up. If anything, they're the only ones who did. R2 is the best selling Resistance game and most of the general public hated it. You're right that they didn't know about any of that stuff, and that's why they didn't care. After R2 they just wiped Resistance from their memory and were done with it. Resistance didn't have the kind of fanbase to survive such apathy from the rest of the gaming world.
How could you possible know this though? Most of gaf hated it, but that means nothing towards the general population. Most of the public thinks Modern Warfare/COD is a hardcore series simply because older guys in their late 20s/30s play it and it's on the super duper hardcore xbox live and so on. They have no clue about games like Demons Souls or Catherine or Last Guardian and so on. That makes their opinion meaningless to me and proves nothing of whether R2 was a good game or not.
I honestly think the people who bought R2 were also hardcore people and very little were of the 'general public'. Resistance 1 is the only one of the franchise I would say more casual fans played because it was one of the first exclusive shooter offerings on PS3. But in 2007 COD4 came out, 2008 WaW was coming out, Gears 2 etc. all of these casual 'dudebro' kind of people scattered and went to different more popular options. Resistance 2 was left in the dust at that point except for hardcore fans or PS3 only owners that weren't interested in COD.
I think if there were casual fans who bought and played R2, they were in the very small minority and therefore couldn't put a dent on R3's sales even if none of them bought R3. I think Resistance is inherently only known to/cared about by the hardcore and therefore people would know (based on reading forum posts, E3 videos etc.) that R3 was going to make a lot of changes, Insomniac put out round table discussions talking about it and so on. In fact even if we go under the assumption that many casual players bought R2, why
would they hate it? The single player was similar to Call of Duty, the multi player was much more expansive and interesting compared to 16 player-esque duels, there was 8 player co-op etc. I mean if I were a casual who was used to Call of Duty and experienced Resistance 2 I'd imagine I'd think it was a pretty good game if not better than COD. I certainly don't think they would have reason to bad mouth the game.
If people want to say R3 failed (I don't know if it did, I don't know how much it would need to sell to consider that, maybe jstevenson could shed light on that I'm not sure) I would say the reason it did is because of what I said before. Casuals are attracted to COD/battlefield, everyone else has shooter fatigue, Resistance doesn't set itself apart enough the way Bioshock does, and the 16 player COD multi player is something hardcore fans aren't necessarily interested in at this point in time.