This has been a strange summer for video game numbers. You might have already read this, but Duke Nukem Forever was a horrible game. It also made money for 2K Games, despite the bad press. That’s kind of surprising. You know what else is surprising? Catherine being a hit in America, selling 200,000 copies for Atlus’ biggest game launch in the west yet.

Let’s forget about schaudenfreude and instead look at the facts: this is great news. Yes, both games’ successes are great news. Duke might have sucked, but it was made by Gearbox, which made a great little game called Borderlands. Duke Nukem Forever might have made money and maybe 2K Games will want to make a sequel in the future, but for now Borderlands 2 is being made, and that’s good news. As for Catherine, it’s a surprising victory for Atlus, a company which has focused mostly on niche Japanese games (including the excellent Shin Megami Tensei games), and to see a particularly weird and Japanese game like Catherine become a hit means the company might be more open to putting out even more surreal, unique games.