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forest-spirit on 15 November 2010
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Khuutra said:
forest-spirit said:

I don't think 2 million was realistic at all for Metroid. Had they made a 2D platformer out of it ala NSMB and DKCR then maybe, but anything else would have failed. Heck even Pime 4 made by Retro would've failed, honestly.

Metroid on home consoles has fallen quite hard since Metroid Prime on GC. MP2 sold less than half (which is several times more terrible than Other M's performance, imho) and MP3 improved by a couple of 10k's over MP2 but ended up selling less than half compared to MP1.

Given the demographics of the Wii and the cutscene- and storyheavy (ok, heavy if compared to other Nintendo games, otherwise not so much) direction of Other M (and it being Metrogaiden ) I think it was madness to expect that much. The competition that Benga brought up doesn't help either. 500k-750k would've been a good target and anything above that would be icing on the cake.

 

Disclaimer: This post contained 15% damage control.

So they should have expected it to sell 33-50% as much as the last Metroid game on the console? Why would it be realistic to expect it to be the worst-selling console Metroid of all time? Why make the game if those were their expectations?


Well, that's a great question! I have no idea. What I do know is that the ones who knew what the game would be like and said "Hell, this will be a 2 million seller!" should've done some more research.

They did try to simplify the controls by not using the nunchuck but if they wanted that to attract some greenhorns they should've skipped the 3D part. The final gameplay just weren't very casual friendly. Looking at my copy of Other M there's nothing there to attract new gamers. There's auto-aim in the game but that isn't mentioned (in the pal version). What you have is basicaly "cutscenes!", "voices!", "weapon upgrades!", "close combat!", and "two perspectives!". It also has a 16 rating. So, not exactly a game to attract casual gamers, and if Nintendo thought it would they were mistaken.

 

So, we end up with the Metroid fanbase, which should be healthy enough to atleast make it a million seller. Unless they split the fanbase, which they did with the new direction. Someone at Nintendo must have understood that a chunk of the fans would be turned off, and with very few new gamers to fill the hole you don't end up with a huge seller.