Kipiru said:
100% of those surveys were made with the clear goal of showing the dislike of the game.
Actually, the first (and, so far, biggest) poll that came out after the game simply had the title "Do you want a better ending?" The author (as far as I know) never intended it to be a "hit piece", but a general gauge of where the hardcore community was at. In every poll I've personally seen thereafter, whether positive- or -negative slanted, there has been a clear majority of votes that asked to fix the game and/or expressed disappointment in one way or another.
In my mind that means that such surveys and forums would attract almost entirely people who are looking to vent their dissappointment with the game and so do not represent in any way the degree to which the game was received by the majority of players.
I'll tell you this much: up here in Canada, we typically get polling during election seasons by Ipsos-Reid, a nationally-recognized surveying/consulting firm that is hired by just about everyone to ensure fair and balanced polling. They ask similar questions to the original poll ("How satisfied were you with x?", "Did you feel that x was not up to standard?"). They would kill for a poll that has 100,000 votes. There are so few polls that have a response of that magnitude, outside politics, that it's an anomaly.
100,000 votes of anything, with such a clear majority, shows you a near-universal trend for a question, product or service.
I don't know of anywhere, that the amount of people expressing dislike with the game to go above the number you gave 100,000.
Because it's exactly that - one poll. Of the other information I've read about the game over the last few months (judging from responses by people who actually work in the stat industry, and as I mentioned earlier in this post), the consumer confidence for the ME brand has fallen roughly 40% between March and October. Add to that the general trend that one vote represents 10X its value in word-of-mouth/referral, and you start to see where the general discontent of the game comes from.
Every anecdotal piece of evidence seen over the last year supports this notion. Gamestop was reporting a record number of returns for the game (and its unit price dropped sharply -in half - soon after release, which is almost unheard of). The DLC sales are, according to those who actually track the XBox and PSN charts, nowhere near what they were for ME1 or ME2. The Mass Effect Trilogy rerelease was a complete dud in terms of sales, despite having a big marketing push. The sales, if we're to take VGChartz as gospel, shows that 3 did better than ME1 but worse than ME2 in lifetime sales to date, which is not good considering EA made a massive marketing push and had the same time spent in development.
Most of the people that have played the game are happy with it
Ah, yes, the mystical "silent majority". A standard fallacy. If there was some hidden percentage of people that enjoyed the game and wanted to see it succeed, we would have seen them out in force by now. It's nine months later, and the backlash still hasn't died down, even from new fans of the series.
As I mentioned, the consumer confidence in the ME brand has dropped almost 40% over the last six months. That is nowhere close to being a "minority". In fact, the same source (an analyst on the HTL forum) mentioned that not only is confidence down, but every official Bioware channel has seen its userbase dwindle over the preceding months, and that the majority demographic (according to posts on forums, sales and the like) now skews much, much younger that it was previously - it's now in the 13-18 range, whereas previously it was in the 18-30 demographic.
If anything, the fact that EA has clearly intended (both in their branding and general design philosophy) to make their games skew to a younger audience has clearly backfired. Most of the interest, if the sources are to be believed, are coming from schoolkids who log in from school computers - nice if you're gunning for the CoD crowd, but a misnomer in terms of its translation to actual sales value.
Hell, you don't have to look further than this forum. I've mentioned this before, and no one seems to have a retort. A year ago, this was the unofficial "ME love-in" - you couldn't find a single person who outright hated the series. Now, every post on this site, even if they legitimately enjoyed the game, has to qualify it with "well, the ending sucked, but..." That's cognitive dissonance in full effect, and shows that the fanbase, from what we can see online, is irrevocably fractured. There is no minority about it - it's a full-fledged "base breaker", to quote TVTropes.
