You might take The Witcher as another example. As the games of this series had very hard decisions to do, which - in difference to most other games - don't have apparent outcomes. However the Witcher games were extremely successful and I think the decisionmaking was a big selling point.
But as I write that...it's actually quite interesting thinking what I quoted about Gothic "the commercial success is mostly limited to german speaking regions and eastern europe" and considering that The Witcher is from poland.
But in the end everyone prefers and dislikes different stuff and to simplify gamer groups as the praised hardcore and the despised "mass" isn't really doing it justice though I tend to do the same.
So for people like you maybe "everyone not playing Geneforge3 due to the graphics" is the mass while you are hardcore. And for me it's "everyone not playing games on highest difficulty" is the mass, or "people owning and playing phone and console games" are the mass while I consider myself hardcore.
@GhanBuriGhan
I think that Vogel himself should try his luck at Kickstarter to show presence (and with that increasing sales of past games) and gather Money for his next games.
While most companies only focus on one Game and almost start over with the next one, Vogel basically re-uses everything which makes remotely sense. And I am pretty sure that getting additional 20 000$ or so to spend on a couple of soundtracks, sound effects and tilesets would help a lot, not just for one game, but for several games following thereafter.