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[–] WedgeSerif 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

The majority of gamers aren't "core" gamers; they're the "filthy casuals." I mean, compare the 30-million-strong player base of Hearthstone to the number of people you see in the tournaments. Tens of millions of those players are just fun, casual folks. This is true for the Calls of Duty, the Assassins' Creeds, the Battlefields, the Madden NFLs, and so on. In other words, the majority of videogame buyers/players don't hang out on NeoGAF or the Steam Forums. They rely on advertising in mainstream media outlets to learn about new games. Publishers need broad-spectrum advertising to sell their games profitably.

As far as making a "better" game goes, it's not so easy. Mass Effect: Andromeda had a much bigger budget than NieR:Automata, but the animations in NieR are WAY better than ME:A. I recently read that the ME:A developers spent about a year trying to make procedural planet generation work, but they ended up scrapping the idea. That's a year of development wasted, and it shows in the final product. That wasted year had nothing to do with an advertising budget; it had everything to do with poor design decisions.

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[–] Codewow [S] ago 

No, ME:A's issue was lack of talent. If they would have hired a more expensive set of programmers, it could have worked. There are plenty of developers that have managed what they were setting out to do.

And for those casuals. They know a new CoD, BF, AC is coming out. There's no need for 6 TV ads on a single episode of a show. With a 150 million dollar ad budget, you'd get an entire team worth of developers to make the game that much better.