Crysis 2 didn’t flop, but it didn’t sold the millions of units they believed they were about to sell.
Brink, I think it broke even. It wasn’t a game that expensive to make. Splash Damage is more a small team.
For the rest, I agree with you.
But you know what? This isn’t really about shooters, it’s about videogames in general with expensive budgets (because gamers ask for high production values and a full feature list) but the reality of the market is that there is only space for 6 or 7 games selling more than x million units, so apart from the best/the most famous ones, the rest fall short.
Hence, the long announced crash of modern videogames. People are expecting it for a pair of years already!
Thanks for the elaboration. That’s some good info, but without more information about the production and marketing budgets, I think it’s a bit of a bit of a stretch to draw the conclusion you’re drawing about some of the games (i.e. that they flopped relative to the costs to produce and market them). Furthermore, a lot of the commercial success of a game has to do with its long-term prospects. The conventional wisdom is that the first game loses money, the sequel makes that money back, and #3 is where you cash in. I don’t doubt that Resistance 3 was a huge disappointment for Sony, but it’s working according to a whole different type of math than, say, Rage.
But mainly, I’m hoping that Fear 3 and Darkness II, both of which were really good, paid off for their publishers.
