Critical Reasoning

The Action-Packed Gaming Company, based on the success of the previous season's video game featuring the character Sam Li, of the popular Fist of Awe series of martial arts movies, developed for the current season a similar martial arts game featuring a new character who is also a martial arts master. The new game had improved 3-D graphics, enhanced multiplayer capability, and dozens of new martial arts moves developed by real-life masters. However, marketing surveys showed that teenagers were uninterested in this new game, and the game sold very poorly.

The passage implies that an explanation for the failure of the new game is based on doubt regarding which of the following assumptions?

a)Teenagers make purchasing decisions based on the technological merits of video games, not the name recognition of the games' main characters.

b)Buyers of video games prefer to purchase games based on popular movies.

c)The Fist of Awe series of movies was extremely popular with teenagers who regularly purchase video games.

d)Technological improvement from one video game to the next does not guarantee a corresponding increase in sales.

e)The successful video game may have benefited from advertising associated with the Fist of Awe movies, a benefit the failed video game did not have.