Comment by vlunkr

There was plenty of movie tie-in shovelware that sold well. ET is obviously the infamous example, but this continued to go on into the 3D era. Sports games too. They aren't universally bad, but often they succeeded just because they have the official license. It's just like any kind of media, bad stuff can succeed because of deceptive marketing or slapping a familiar name on garbage.

This is all a vast oversimplification. There are obviously hundreds of games coming out every year without gacha mechanics.