I'm not going to name names, but I previously worked at a company that made a game that turned out to be a huge hit. It wasn't a particularly good game; it got horrible reviews, yet it made millions of dollars. The lesson the company learned from this event - and I actually heard this said in a meeting - is that quality doesn't matter. Needless to say, subsequent games from the company didn't sell, the company never found another hit. I wish I were a better person and didn't feel some small amount of guilty pleasure over the fact that the company went under, but I do. (This is called 'schadenfreude' by German types.) In any case, because quality is not sufficient for a game to be a hit, publishers are understandably reluctant to pony up the cash for an untested concept or for a game type that hasn't been wildly popular previously.