meh

I don't agree with that. There have been plenty of times where people enjoy a game and believe that the next one will be just as good, so they buy it without reading or considering the (p)reviews. The game might sale like crazy and be a "commercial success," but that doesn't mean it was any good, much less "great." On the flip side, there are games that are revered as some of the best of all time, but marketing and poor advertising meant no one ever even heard of them. Take Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, for example. Both are extraordinary games, but most people have never even heard of them, and, at least for Ico, the sales were pretty lousy.

Ridiculous

The commercial (sales) success of a game has nothing to do with its greatness. It has everything to do with the greatness of a its marketing. So of course a Marketing Man like Steve Allison would see games (which he views only as products to be marketed) in this incredibly narrow way. Silly, silly remarks about a great game needing to appeal to the whims of a male audience can be utterly ignored. I suppose Mr. Allison wants to write off over half of the human population (women). Lastly, he seems to disparage art-house films. If it wasn't for so-called "art-house" films, cinema would atrophy under the weight of what 13-year-old boys want to see. That's greatness in a nutshell, isn't it? Yep. This guy is a real corporate horse with blinders on. He can only see what is relevant to his job, according to the quotations cited here.