So basically what you're saying is that over the course of 10 years and with 900k copies, the 2 Fallout games have sold as much as half of what Gears of War sold in the first month alone ... yes I can see the big bucks are rolling in
Considering the budget of the one game vs that of the other...yes, bucks. It's Interplay's only current source of revenue, amusingly enough.
Unless you're arguing all games should be Gears of War because that such a hit grrrrlol!
And just to make this clear: It is not being a defeatist to know thy enemy.
It is if you shrug and do nothing about it.
Could you describe a turn-based RPG of your imagination that you would recon would sell on the level of the current crop of action/ real time RPG's. Who would be your target audience, how would you advertise it. Just curious.
Sell on the level of? Do you mean sell like Oblivion or sell like a flop? Because that's the thing...you may think linking hits and flops arm in arm is a good idea to float a business upon, but it's come down crashing around our ears more than once.
I'm not pretending a turn-based Fallout 3 could outsell Oblivion, I'm "pretending" that to demand of any and all games to sell those kind of numbers is ludicrous. The market simply isn't that big.
Oddly enough, in profit margins, a market with big sellers with high budget and a market with low sellers with low budgets are roughly the same. The difference between the two markets is that the latter is low-risk and the former is high-risk.
I don't think you paid attention to Economy 101 if you think that the market for games like Oblivion is "better" than for niche RPGs just because the numbers are bigger. Smart money would invest in both markets. Apparently there isn't much smart money in the gaming industry, as evinced by the high frequency of companies going belly-up.
As for your question, I don't know, I'm not best equipped to answer that, I haven't been trained in PR, but I know enough to know that Troika was a profiteable company by doing low-budget games tailored to a niche market. So is Spiderweb. Neither are taken serious by the industry and the consequences of that hurt both. In a healthy market, a Troika could produce mid-budget games for its fairly large niche market sans problem.
Unless you think there's some kind of Godly "minimum budget" that games now have, something that's been amusingly implied with "games are more expensive to make now!" A drôle if uninformed remark.