That was Baker's response to the criticisms TLOUP2 faced when it released.
While I can understand the desire to stand by your work, in a creative medium, you need to be prepared for the fact that not everything you do is gonna land. As you said, a big failure is a big failure. It's gonna happen. I think folks these days think they're owed some kind of success, as if history wasn't littered with countless failures.
Yup.
It seems that kind of viewpoint is a very media focused kind of response. Big egos, grifting for the next gig, they might be genuine, they might be PRing a bogus response you name it.
Put it this way. A company makes a bunch of different cookies.
Probably chocolate chip is the most popular. Most people seem to like chocolate, but some people like other flavours. I'm indifferent and will buy all kinds of cookies. But there's going to be some who stick to the basics like chocolate chip or oatmeal or whatever is the popular flavour in their region.
If the company comes out with some funky flavours and they fail or get laughed at, dont blame the customer base. Maybe they just dont give a shit about the new cranberry mint flavour, or they bought it and hate it. Dont be pissed at the customers. Blame yourselves for spending all this time and money making a product people dont want or like.
But media (doesnt matter if games, tv, movies), seem to have more of a "I want to make my dream idea and I did some napkin math. Let's just make it over 5 years and $50M budget, show gamers a year before release on YT (were already 80% done so there's no turning back), push it through and hope gamers love it. And why shouldnt they love it? We all love making it!".
That kind of strategy is a very hit and miss way of selling a product.
Every company has their share of product failures. But media people seems to make the biggest stink about it the most. At my company, I've seem entire product lines bombing and being disbanded after 1-2 years. So bad, it goes down the tubes. That's a lot of money, R&D, warehousing etc... Lets face it. A big waste of time. But I've never seen any of the marketing or R&D people who are most vested in product development ever go on Linkedin or Twitter ranting about bad customers not liking it or trying to skew the narrative that they tried their best and failed. A bad product is a bad product. You just man up to it and forget it going forward, and work on the next thing.