[Falell]

This doesn't follow at all. The game received _excellent_ reviews prior to release. It's currently the second best reviewed PC game of the year on metacritic [1] (an aggregator with some problems but I don't think this is controversial).

Exactly contrary to your point, both Clair Obscur and Blue Prince (#1) got excellent reviews in the days leading up to release leading to people on e.g. Reddit saying "this game came out of nowhere and it has amazing reviews, I'm excited".

https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/pc/all/all-time/metas...

[chowells]

Yes, people noticed it's good. But that's not how I heard about the game. That's not how anyone in the three separate groups of friends I heard about the game from heard about it. In fact, the only person I knew who really follows that sort of stuff is the only person I know who wasn't interested.

I think you're confusing cause and effect. If you look at steam's concurrent player counts, you see that the number of concurrent players kept increasing for the first 10 days after the game's release. That's not consistent with curators instructing people to buy a game at release. That's consistent with massive word-of-mouth spread. Everyone is talking about it and rating it highly because it's good, not because they were told to.

https://steamdb.info/app/1903340/charts/

[loveparade]

I think you are bringing up an interesting discussion of curation vs. word of mouth. Where exactly do you draw the line?

Players counts kept increasing because a people came across the game on social media - upvoted reddit posts, high number of retweets, streamer sponsorships, etc. And a lot of that got rolling only because of initial positive reviews and PR. But isn't upvoting/downvoting something on reddit or other social media a form of curation? Is there even such a thing as pure word of mouth on the internet?