A potential purchaser comes to your product with preconceived ideas, biases and their own frames of reference. When they first encounter your product, they look for clues, however tiny to place the game into a predefined box: to pigeonhole the product based on past experience.

This poses a problem for game designers who are attempting to rise above the crowd in a saturated market. If you innovate, you risk confusing potential purchasers; but if you stick with familiar concepts, how are you ever going to stand out?

An effective product designer controls the context in which their product is seen. A brilliant game in the wrong context is always going to fail.