| famousringo said: At first glance, this article seems to reveal the flaw in Nintendo's marketing plan: That because they only announce games a few months before release, people assume nothing is coming. But this article also reveals the flip side. Because Wii Sports Resort was announced almost a year ago, it's considered hum-drum and unimportant. So is there a happy medium for Nintendo here? Or are they just going to get criticized no matter what they do? |
There is a happy medium, and we've seen it pretty often in the past year. Brawl and Wii Fit were both covered extensively and positively by their respective target mediums, despite the fact that both of them were announced a year or more in advance.
The thing is, media people are all the same: all they want information that interests their readers/viewers. Staying silent on a game until the last second is inconvenient for them because it gives them less information to cover before you make your announcment. Since they can't keep feeding their audience new information, the media becomes frustrated (you are, after all, making it impossible for them to do their job).
Brawl and Wii Fit had Nintendo show a few cards early on, so the media had something to grab onto. They then slipped out new information on a steady basis, so the media had more stuff to talk about and pass on. By contrast, the media can't talk about Nintendo's lineup because it only knows about five or six titles, and it can't talk about Resort anymore because all the information we have about it is almost a year old.
I actually sympathize with them, for once. I seriously think Nintendo needs to rethink at least some of its media relations; they're not managing them very well right now, and while the gaming media's power is actually rather miniscule, the frustration appears to be bleeding into the mainstream media, and that can spell problems with investors.
