Are you under the impression the internet is a recent invention?
You're acting like the original TLoU and Spider-man games success were random accidents.
All these major games have massive marketing budgets, and sequels should sell even more due to years of anticipation for a sequel to a quality original.
Yet, both sequels failed to make 70% of the sales of the original.... because of the main factor that contributed to the major success of the originals, word of mouth, wasn't there for the sequels anywhere close.
Word of mouth is undoubtedly the #1 contributing factor in the success of... practically everything in a free market like games. No one has infinite money or infinite time, so we hear what other gamers have been saying about the games they played.
Marketing for games shuts down to a maximum of 10% after two weeks after a game is released, but word of mouth can keep a game selling well for multiple weeks, months, even years later.
Look up the sales for Witcher3 in its first month, first year, and the last 10 years because it's about to have its decade anniversary in less than a month and figure out the puzzle why its sold well for 10 years while 97% of games are mostly forgotten within a few short months.
By the way, your point about 85 million PS4s and 55 million PS5s is a valid one for both Spiderman games, but it doesn't work out for TLoU1&2
For example TLoU1 was released near the end of the PS3's life cycle in 2013, and the total number os PS3 consoles in 2013 was... slightly less than its total number of units sold today.
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And given the very warm reception of the original, seven years in-between releases, and a 18 month marketing cycle to generate buzz... and it sold 44% fewer copies than the original.
Well, that's because there's fewer PS4s on the market than PS3s... right?
Wrong.
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You're going to have to come up with another case than to blame twitter or 'bubbles' for just not willing to accept that word-of-mouth is by far the #1 factor, and not marketing, to a game being overwhelmingly successful or a flop.
Edit - Forgot to add that the TLoU1 remaster was released on PS4 within a year of that console's release, and not only sold very well despite there only being few PS4s sold at that point, but also sold well throughout the PS4 life cycle, and overall outsold TLoU2 on the PS4 when it was released.
According to recent leaks, The Last of Us Part 2 sold 8 million fewer copies than The Last of Us Remastered.
tech4gamers.com
Yes, so we've established there are more ps4's than ps3's.
The TLOU1 remaster being released on ps4 alongside the original on ps3 is supporting my argument of bigger potential buyer base for the original game, since the remastered TLOU1 on ps4 even outsold TLOU on ps3 itself. TLOU has essentially benefited from being released across 3 generations of PS consoles (also remastered for ps5) vs two generations for part 2. And another benefit of having double the selling cycle, roughly 10 vs 5 years overall.
I also used the player base argument specifically for Spider-man, because that case was less muddy. That doesn't mean it's 1 on 1 applicable to The Last of Us, even though it might follow a similar pattern, which is weaker sales to a sequel to a big franchise, which according to you is mainly because they went woke, which I find a highly questionable and reductive conclusion.
So the player base that could explain some of the difference, and I don't know if it's the case for the specific games we're discussing, but possible competing games released in the same window. Another one is the global situation at the time, TLOU2 was released during covid. Since popculture consumption media like gaming went up during this time, one could make the argument that should have buoyed TLOU2's sales, but there was also a lot of financial instability, so who knows, lots of that gaming consumption could have gone to free to play (Fortnite) or non-AAA (and therefore cheaper) games.
Animal crossing also exploded during that time and I checked the price of that and that was a whopping $60. But I'm going to take a guess that a fun, happy, other place to spend time hit the sweet spot for people during covid, regardless of pricing. As opposed to the extremely dour setting of TLOU2. I guess being on the Switch also didn't hurt.
But let's pretend overall covid was a net positive for TLOU2. Now look at TLOU1 surrounding financial situation, it was released in 2013, 5 years from the major housing crisis and the economy was in full upswing again, all the way to 2019, right before covid. So I'd posit that TLOU benefitted more from the surrounding financial global situation than TLOU2.
Another thing about Spider-man 2, it's player base probably skews towards a bit younger, lots of these kids are probably more familar with Morales due to the succes of the animated movies so they might not even have those major issues you seem to have with the way that character was inserted into the game. It might not have directly translated to sales that matched the original, but that also doesn't necessary mean that was the major cause of lower sales.
Edit : I also saw that there was sort of a in between game between 1 and 2, Miles Morales, so I don't think franchise fatigue argument is completely unwarranted, 3 games of essentially the same template spread across 5 years sure sounds like a form of market saturation. Hard not to imagine some of the novelty of the first part is gone. Reminds me a bit of the Dead Space trilogy, although that had a different sales trajectory, 1, 4, 1 million copies sold for each iteration ( I know there were other things going on too). For me personally, I'm usually already kind of tired of a singular game about 2/3 through, so I wouldn't find it shocking for people dropping off for a sequel, let alone a third part.
And selling over 20 million of a single game is absolutely nuts, must be some perfect storm scenario to reach those kind of sales that might not be easily replicable. Selling 10 million copies and not being considered succesful/profitable is probably even crazier. Maybe that's more damning of the industry's spiraling production and marketing costs than 'weak' sales.
