I'm shocked they're not bouncing back already. Gamers are prone to forgetting after couple of weeks.
Gamers forget in the opposite direction.
Gamers don't "forget" that a game is bad and pick it up later. Gamers focus is excslusively on pre-orders and first-week sales - if the game isn't good then, it's never good (no matter what happens to fix it). No Man's Sky was smart and was able to circumvent this by essentially "re-launching", activating the hype train for a second time (which somewhat paid off, although even with all the fixes and additions I still don't think NMS is particularly great).
The typical gamer purchase cycle for AAA games is:
1. See super slick advertisement/announcement and get on hype train
2. Pre-Order game
3. Get game on release day, it's all the buzz everywhere and is what everyone is talking about
Then, step 4 largely depends on whether or not the game is terrible or not. If the game is terrible:
4. Immediately stop playing, call the game garbage, make complaining youtube videos and articles, and make a huge fuss about "How broken it is" (see: Fallout 76). Unfortunately gamers learn nothing from this step and will return to step 1 for the next game released by whatever studio released this crap.
If the game is decent (AAA games are almost never good, so decent is usually the best they get to - functional and playable but not very deep):
4. Play for 1-2 weeks, maybe some people platinum the game in a quick binge (the game has to be short so people can platinum it while only taking the week before they get bored). Then, because the game isn't particularly deep or interesting, they lose interest in about a week. Despite losing interest, game is remembered positively and is considered "good", so they eagerly await the sequel so they can go back to step 1 again and play the sequel for a week with it's mildly-changed mechanics.
I tend to find people who mostly play Indie games or older AAA games don't really follow the same cycles. Instead, they will often buy games at various points in their lifetime - some indie games they might get on or near release, but the next day they might buy a game that's 5 or 10 years old. Quality matters more than following "the cycle".
Yeah it's almost as good as Oblivion.
Oblivion is bad, don't get me wrong, but this game is an absolute insult to Oblivion and everything it does right. I get hating on Oblivion for it's shitty story, boring world, horrendous quest markers, and it's bugs, but at least Oblivion is functional, has most of the mechanics from Morrowind, and wasn't a blatant cash grab. It's also not made by hack-fraud developers who only got their positions by playing the diversity card.
