Many individual game developers were used to claim that their perfectly designed graphics would not ever attract as much players as they had expected. For very long time, I was also confused with such an issue until I found the reason inside of it. The causation is actually very simple, those people did not do a good job on the color control.
When breaking down the problem, it is not too hard to find that for most people, the first thing they observe is not the actual content, it is the color. If one interesting design has very bad color mixing, big amount of audiences are very likely to get away.
It is a really interesting problem, because this explains the concepts of sensation and perception; it points out the idea that sensation happens before perception, and it will give people the first impression of what they see.
