Well its been what a week since the delay of Brawl was announced and I thought it was suicide. Nintendo delaying its most anticipated title, in the face of competition like Halo3 I was utterily stunned to hear Brawl would be a no show. However after further thinking I realized Nintendo may actually be on to something.
Halo3 while it has been doing extremely well and even pushing massive volumes of hardware it has been innaffective at actually trumping Nintendo by more then a few thousand units. This means that even Halo is unable to beat Nintendo this fall. The longevity of the hardware alone without solid software support has proven extremely suprising. Most consoles with the lack of quality third party titles and few first party titles would have DreamCasted ages ago but the innovation of Wii has enabled it to do what no other console could sell utter crap.
The last console to manage to sell this well without solid first party support was the PS2. Fact is with the Wii selling itself so well why bother releasing your big AAA+ title. With SuperMarioGalaxy being released next month Nintendo has no reason to rush Brawl along for the holiday season.
What will benefit from Brawl not being on store shelves this fall. Nintendo's own younger IP's like BattalionWars which is bound to garner far more attention without Brawls competition being one of the few Wifi enabled titles. Sonic&Mario at the Olympics will also benefit because of Sonic's appearance in Brawl the two titles would have been in direct competition this fall which would have affected S&M at the Olympics. Other titles like Donkey Kong Barrel Blast would also benefit as gamers are going to be despiratly looking for entertainment.
In the end Brawl will be released shortly before MarioKart. This will give Nintendo a massive edge over the competition next spring. We also know that Nintendo held back this year only announcing two new games at E3. That means Nintendo has a lot of unnanounced titles set for release next year.
I bet you Nintendo is making a premptive move to avoid the Wii from dropping once the novelty of innovation wares off!
-JC7
"In God We Trust - In Games We Play " - Joel Reimer
