Critics hated the Tony Hawk's Ride board: they said it was unresponsive, unlike being on a real skateboard and, most importantly, unenjoyable to use. It also came with quite a massive price tag which, as DJ Hero proved, isn't nice if there are hardly any games that support the peripheral. I never played the game, so I can't comment on what exactly went wrong with the title (or the board) but Tony Hawk has his own ideas: the critics never gave the board a fair chance.
"I think that Ride was a bit rushed for a number of reasons, mostly because probably for about the first half of the development process it was just figuring out how to make a board and how to make it work — we were in uncharted territory," he told Joystiq. "So the game was a bit rushed, but I still feel like the critics never really gave it a chance in terms of learning how to play. They got on it and went straight into expert mode, because supposedly they're expert gamers. And they didn't really learn the mechanics of how the board works, and so I felt like they already had their mind made up before it came out. It was a gimmick and it was a peripheral and whatnot, and they never really took the time to learn how to play it."
