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Publicity only works for short-term sales so in the end the bad product would suffer because of it's own lack of quality. Best to make sure you make a good game, instead of trying to get magazines to report on how bad it is, your image as developer suffers bigtime, eventhough such publicity could temporarily boost your sales.




of course you have to make an extraordinarily bad product. make it, publish it, let them say it is extraordinarily bad and everybody buys it because its extraordinarily bad, nobody will be disappointed or angry at you, they just laugh, but in the meanwhile you make a lot of money and can fund the next project with it. more money means better quality and so your new game will be much better. now the magazines will say "remember the studio with the crappy game a year ago, seems they got their acto together..." and you have publicity for your new game...

a few years ago there was a world war 2 shooter game. game star called it worst game of the year and gave it an award for sucking. the game sold around 15k units in germany in one year... that is around 5 times as much as a similar game in the same price range...
another example: look at the pearl harbour series in the us... let us call the games "simple"... part 1 sold more than 200k units because all magazines reported the game extraordinarily sucks and therefore is fun to play... part 2 was a solid game sold very well because it got attention of the magazines for its predecessor sucking...

its a risky game and maybe nothing to be proud of, but if played right i do not see where your image is harmed in a way you can not make up for it... and it is the perfect way to get the money and the media attention to produce a better game..

but thats just to explain my initial statement...
it is not suitable for casual games, they have to be top quality to reach maximum conversion rates...