Selling a sequel without selling the first...

Bulletstorm can't seem to catch a break, and in almost every way I'm forced to play devil's advocate for each side. At first launch it was a game that looked fun, but got hit with piracy, fox news' ignorance, and just plain low sales. So the sequel that was so clearly planned, suddenly got sent nowhere. Now that it's back, it's been hit with everything else. Actually it's so many things, I'll make it a list:

1. The crowd that decides they're so special, they need to approve of every damn release, pretended they didn't care about this getting a remaster. They said so by flooding the comments on the game they did not care about.
2. People raged on about the remaster price, which is understandable since I commonly do so as well.
3. Gearbox struck a retailer deal with an infamous gray market seller. Upon complaints and a discussion, they pulled out, but still got flak for even bothering with the deal to begin with. Even in an act to fix things, people would still rather hate them to begin with than say "at least they fixed their fuck-up". The game is just collateral damage for all they care.
4. The remaster really couldn't remaster all that much, and the fans are still in agreement that the price is stupid.
5. Even when People Can Fly state the obvious, that they're hinging a sequel on this remaster's success, people fuss about it. Do I need to remind PCF, they choose to do a cliff-hanger ending?

Getting kicked around quite a bit

So I especially want to talk about point #5. Bulletstorm is in a weird situation here. How do you make a game? Well, you need money. Okay, so how do you make a franchise? Well you start it somewhere in making a game, and usually you have to build it up a bit before it catches on. A franchise is naturally a bit rough to get going in that sort of process. There's also freak incidents like R&C where it goes get, hits a peak, drops for a long while into near nothingness, then gets a freakin' movie and sells the game big time while the movie flops. WTF is that big chunk of nonsense!? But usually a franchise just goes forward for a while, that's how all the big ones came to be. Aside from Assassins Creed, I can't name many that just hit the ground storming markets with millions on top of millions.

Now Bulletstorm, and a couple others, are over here saying they need a remaster to sell a game they couldn't sell, so they're overcharging the remaster price because... obviously people will rush out to buy an overpriced six year old game once the first copy didn't sell well, right? No, wrong. Double wrong with all the other shit that happened. Some people will turn away just to spite Gearbox alone. However my real question is in why they decided to go this route to begin with. Did they really lack the money to make a sequel? Did they actually not have the ability? They could have re-used assets, cut the multiplayer nobody even asked for, and made a sequel that caught a little more money in around 2013/14. It wouldn't have looked so pretty on newer consoles, but then again neither did Dark Souls 2, and we were all looking for newer things to play on them even if they didn't look their best. The first game sold 1 million. EA, I'm looking at you when I'm calling your expectations bullshit, and you could have given this IP more of a chance than throwing it out the door because it didn't automatically print you 8 million instead. Obviously as a new IP, it takes a little time and extra marketing to get rolling, but sequels are cheaper and where the profit usually kicks in... if you don't fuck it's launch window up in some colossal way.

People Can Fly claims to have done their best, when dealing with both Bulletstorm & their gears entry. However Gears clearly wasn't some new darling, it just had poor luck and as a spin-off, people weren't biting. So is it fair to determine it on the same level as Bullestorm? Just stop making Bulletstorm and Gears? Nope, gears had a remaster, then a 4th entry people raved about, it seems to be doin' fine enough. It's not the 22 million style acclaim all over again, but Gears still turn for the franchise, while Bullestorm was just left to rot for... some stupid reason EA probably made up as to why they can't invest in it. It's silly really, and I think games like this need a sequel. There should be some golden rule about making a franchise, that you've got to give the game two chances to take off. Some never actually do, and I get it if you want to shut things down at that rate. However making plans for one, then killing it while all the talent is still alive and good just because it didn't storm the gates is... well, stupid. I'm not just speaking for Bullestorm here either, but for games in general. ...and no, a remaster doesn't fix that. A remaster is not a sequel. It doesn't get much for marketing, it doesn't get people excited, and it doesn't even mean you'll match the sales of the first time around. People like me, who love it enough to run out there and get it, don't make up your entire userbase from the first time around. Some people are fine sticking to their old copies, while others just aren't in the mood, and new and old alike might be easily watching on and scoffing at the launch price, ready to wait it down. You cannot expect a remaster to outsell a game that didn't do good to begin with. I hope their expectations are capped at a 200'000 sales mark at the highest. 1 million + positive reviews, should have been good enough to begin with, to show that their was indeed interest. Now please, stop stalling and either fix your cliff-hanger with a real ending, or stop pretending things.

Is it all crashing down, or can we crash stuff in a new release?