>>715550914
>the genre always had bad sales
Not really. Look at this and compare it to the PS2 DMC titles:
>>715543130
GoW1 and GoW2 sold only around double of what DMC3 and DMC1 did respectively, and those were massive titles back then. The Onimusha games sold less but were still around that range. And they did so in spite of being wildly mismanaged by Capcom. Back then basically every other IP game was being made in the template of these games (Ghost Rider, Lord of the Ring, Nightmare Before Christmas, you name it).
This whole idea that action games or hack and slash or however you want to call them sell bad doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Games like Stellar Blade and Wukong still come out and are super popular. Hell even at their worst they've been way above something like fighting games.