

And my point is that if you asked your normie gamer, which really didn’t exist in the same form, in 2005 who Bungie is — you’d mostly get question marks.
I doubt it. By 2005 people already knew Bungie. Halo was a critical and commercial success and Halo 2 had released a year prior and not only was highly anticipated but ended up as a system seller for Xbox. If you were gaming in 2005 you’d know about Bungie. Had it been about Bungie in 2001 then a normie would give you question marks because at that point Bungie was pretty much unknown. Marathon games were on Mac, they made a RTS game and Oni, which wasn’t all that big of a hit. Halo is what put Bungie on the map and Halo 2 made them very much a household name.
And that’s my point with Crimson Desert as well. Pearl Abyss made BDO before, but they’re still very much an unknown developer. They don’t get the kind of benefit of doubt Bungie or Bioware or Blizzard tend to get. Crimson Desert is the hit that puts weight behind the Pearl Abyss name. The next Pearl Abyss is going to get more eyes because of Crimson Desert.
This would be relevant except that Marathon only sold as well as it did because of the heavy marketing push.
Again, that’s largely my point. You can’t market a game and just sell 5 million units. Marathon sold 1.2 million units because a) it’s a Bungie game so people would be paying attention to it and b) it had heavy marketing behind it. It would’ve sold even less without those two things, but that’s besides the point. The idea that you can just sell 5 million units through marketing is simply not true and Marathon proves it.

I also wrote nothing about sex, that was all in your sex-crazed mind.