Theory
Their best source of advertisement is word of mouth from a strong community - as proven in all the earlier Quake games.
They shot themselves in the foot releasing an MP game that felt unfinished then taking way too long to release a patch. The community really has nothing to be excited about as most of us just feel jipped. They made a few bucks selling a single player game and with no mp test and releasing it (the mp) with all of the known bugs, it's hard to believe that they wanted to do more than that.
The advertisement for Q4 was just that it had Quake in the name. I know when I heard about the terrible mp I still overlooked it and bought it just because of the earlier Quake games.
If this was a new title and all I heard was that it had an average single player game with no replay value and a terrible mp, there's no way I would have even considered picking it up.
They suckered the community.
They shot themselves in the foot releasing an MP game that felt unfinished then taking way too long to release a patch. The community really has nothing to be excited about as most of us just feel jipped. They made a few bucks selling a single player game and with no mp test and releasing it (the mp) with all of the known bugs, it's hard to believe that they wanted to do more than that.
The advertisement for Q4 was just that it had Quake in the name. I know when I heard about the terrible mp I still overlooked it and bought it just because of the earlier Quake games.
If this was a new title and all I heard was that it had an average single player game with no replay value and a terrible mp, there's no way I would have even considered picking it up.
They suckered the community.