You should read my post, JG27CaptStubing
I posted that selling numbers and quality are
NOT related, nor do they say anything about the quality of food, nor did I compare the food presented by McDonalds to WoW.
What I did say, though, was that the numbers don't compare, because these two games WoW and IL2 couldn't be further apart, just like McDo and my local Pizza-Man, because WoW serves players worldwide and lives through the masses of players (hence MMO
) with literally no offline-value.
IL2 however is more like the Pizza-Man next door, who makes brilliant Pizza in a great variety and serving special wishes, but only for the few people who know this and who'd like to eat some pizza. And a lot of people will never be seen in the area of the my Pizza-Man, because they order and eat at home, just like many, many IL2-players won't ever go online.
It's numbers and area of customers, not quality, that I am speaking about (or numbers and genres, to come back to games).
Coming to quality, though, you are pretty selective with the choice of games you play and which you base your opinion upon. If you just play the games with the by far largest Budget, it's pretty clear you can't complain about the support, but there are other games published by Blizzard, too, and the overall-support and quality over the last 10 years is good, but surely not untouchable great.
IMHO it's not only the learning curve you mentioned. Infact I played IL2 with my 4 year old nephew with easy settings and he was quite good with it. But why should you invest 20 bucks or more for a medicore joystick to test a game, while you can play others with your mouse? And these mouse-controlled games like StarCraft and Warcraft are even shared and advertised by friends on LAN-parties!
The LAN-Parties I visited, I was the only one with a joystick... We've got to live with the fact that Flightsims are a Niche-Product, but knowing that, I'm even more impressed to see that SoW will bind virtual pilots from a lot of eras to a single product. That will indeed be a revolution, IMHO.