@MirkoS77 said:
@kbaily said:
Well there's a lot of reasons, we haven't seen a new installment. One, the last one on the GC didn't sell that well and in the business of games, companies don't want to make things unless they turn a profit. Supposedly that's the same story with Starfox right now.
This is true, but I don't lay the fault at the consumer's feet in this case. Nintendo fails to aggressively market and push their product hard, and this is a HUGE issue that has plagued them lately over the past few years. This is why their conservatism is killing them, and one reason I think Iwata needs to be replaced: they want all this gain without having to spend any money. Nintendo has all these golden IPs, yet they don't make them because they "don't sell".
F-zero, Starfox, Metroid (all brilliant series) don't sell not because they're badly made games or because there's no gamer interest, it's simply because Nintendo mismanages them before and after they're put to market. I'm 100% convinced that if those IPs can't make any money, then none can. I believe if they were in the hands of Sony or MS they could easily make a decent profit. Advertising and being very aggressive with a product is just as vital as producing it, if not more so, and Nintendo needs to learn this. I always mention Apple as a comparison.....they truly understand and utilize the power of advertising.
This post isn't addressed at you btw, just a general observation from what you said.
While I wouldn't blame consumers for a product not selling in most cases, I also don't think it's strictly a marketing issue, either. The fact of the matter is that games, much like any other product, have ceilings relating to the amount of people they can appeal to, and those ceilings are not all equal. I think Nintendo has an understanding that not all of its IPs are as safe to use as the likes of Mario and Pokemon, and handles those IPs accordingly. Still, that doesn't mean that Nintendo can't and won't take chances here and there. If that was the case, we certainly wouldn't have seen IPs like Sin & Punishment, Punch-Out, or Kid Icarus make returns in the past years. Nevertheless, I don't think it's unreasonable for Nintendo or anyone else to exercise some caution, especially with franchises that have clearly struggled in the past decade or so.
In the case of F-Zero, not only did GX struggle to sell on GameCube, but the GBA game GP Legend did even worse... and that game had an anime series to accompany its release as well. While that doesn't mean that Nintendo still couldn't have done a poor job handling the series, I think it's much easier to say that the series isn't becoming Nintendo's next super-hit in our lifetime. The notion that if F-Zero, Starfox, and Metroid can't generate revenue, none can is pretty farfetched, especially since when you consider that producing the kind of game that fans would expect would also be significantly more expensive now than they were during the GCN/Wii days. And no matter how hard Nintendo pushes the games, we can all be certain that they wouldn't reach the type of commercial success that Nintendo's top games typically do, assuming that they have what would be considered "success" at all.
There's a reason why we see the games that we most often do in today's video game world, and while Nintendo's offerings may appeal to a different crowd in general cases, their approach isn't that unorthodox compared to the rest of the industry when it comes to using its brands. And yes, while Nintendo has done a sad job of keeping some consumers interested in their products in recent years, it alone still doesn't explain the huge gap in commercial success between series like Mario, which actually grew during the DS/Wii era and something like Metroid, which has struggled to stay a relevant franchise since its revival.
Anyways, just my two cents on what was looking like an interesting discussion. :P
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