Why did Titanfall "Fail"? (I don't think it did.)

"Why did Titanfall fail?"

I don't think it did.

I keep seeing videos asking this question (and attempting to answer it) asking why Titanfall "failed."

I'm just going to throw this crazy idea out there that the community discussing Titanfall won't ever comprehend: Titanfall was a is successful game.

The issue here is not on the game, but on the community that's assumed the authoritative role on whether or not first-person shooters are successful. This community is none other than the Call of Duty community.

This community is massive. Holding an immense portion of the population of gamers on YouTube, the Call of Duty often ends up seeming like the face of gamers on YouTube - despite the fact that most of us actually disagree with the herd mentality of the community.

Gamers in the CoD community are always judging and talking about new shooters on the basis of whether or not the games will be the next "CoD Killer." This has been going on for a long time now, and has created a rather large problem.

Believe it or not, a game's success is not determined by whether or not it has replaced Call of Duty for the majority of CoD players. That's not how the gaming industry works. And considering how the arcade simplicity and accessibility of Call of Duty has made it the most-played shooter ever online - for gamers and non-gamers - by this measure every game is a failure.

But they're not. A shooter can be successful on its own merits, and I believe Titanfall was a success on just that.

The big reason given for Titanfall having "failed" is that it has dropped in popularity on Twitch and YouTube streams. That could be a good metric to determine a game's success, except the Twitch streamers and YouTube content creators being looked at in these discussions are primarily Call of Duty players. It should be common sense that after a couple weeks, these players will always return to CoD. That's just what they do.

When your niche is one game, when your subscribers and followers come for one game, and you primarily produce content on one game, you're always going to go back to that game. There's nothing wrong with that, but that also means that another game can still be successful if these players go back to Call of Duty.

Titanfall sold a lot of copies. Being the first launch for Respawn, it had a great launch and sold a lot of copies. The collector's edition was one of the most impressive collector's editions of any game I've ever seen, and I'm still trying to get my hands on it.

Due to the contract EA and Respawn signed with Microsoft to make Titanfall exclusive to XBOX One, XBOX 360 and PC, the game naturally lost a lot of sales to Playstation players. I certainly hope Microsoft compensated Respawn enough to make up for this. I do believe, however, that this will just lead to a higher success for the franchise when Titanfall 2 comes out and is available on Playstation 4 as well.

In my opinion, Titanfall did not fail at all. You cannot judge a game's success based on its presence in context of another game. If you're going to argue if a game was a success or failure, at least use some fair and rational metrics for your argument.