Feel free to replace “friends” with “anyone you know in real life” or even online groups you trust or are close with.
“They”:
and my own personal experience; most games I have bought in the past 10 years have been off of recommendations from r/gamingsuggestions before Reddit went to crap and Lemmy came into existence; and even moreso when it is a personal friend recommending things to me.
Mods, feel free to nuke if this feels too close to advertising or better-suited for !videogamesuggestions@lemmy.zip (my own community); I mean it more as a discussion piece but I don’t run the place.
EDIT: The “not” in the title is optional; I’m asking about both successful and failed recommendations.
I got several, I’ve found that some people really think about what I like in a game and nail a recommendation and some people just recommend things they liked, regardless how I feel on them.
The big ones would be Breath of the Wild and Helldivers 2.