Why does Nintendo pass up on localizing so many great games?

[gumby_trucker]

From looking at the top 300 selling Nintendo games of all time according to this site, it seems Nintendo aren't very good at finding a middle ground in terms of sales demographics - the vast majority of that list is populated by games designed with mass-market appeal as top priority: Wii Something, Mario Kart, Nintendogs, Brain Training games, Super Mario and of course Pokeman. (also some Animal Crossing, Tomodachi Collection, etc)

In fact if there are any "medium sellers" on that list they would be the likes of Zelda and Starfox which are considered Nintendo staples, with franchises like Kirby, Metroid, Wario and Yoshi populating the bottom end of the high-sellers range at merely a million a pop on average. The one exception that I can see (which also happens to be more of a "core-game") is Smash Brothers which I can't really explain, other than brand recognition...

Other than that there are a few games on that list from Rare-ware like DKC and GoldenEye which have received follow-ups this gen, as well as others which have moved on to MS as part of their acquisition of Rare.

But if the info on this site is indeed reliable going that far back into Nintendo's catalogue, it seems that for the most part they either have 10-plus million sellers, 1-plus million sellers and games that fail to reach a significant audience, i.e. bombs... (relatively speaking of-course... this is Nintendo after-all)

Franchises like Fire-Emblem, Excite, Star-tropics, F-Zero, Pilot Wings, and many more appear to be missing the mark as far as potential sales are concerned. Not to mention the likes of Sin and Punishment, Wave Race, Battalion Wars, and so on...

It's true there might be a few exceptions this generation such as Punch-Out and Endless Ocean, but there are just as many old franchises which are meeting relatively poor performance this gen. such as Star Fox (DS), Other M, etc.

As much as I'd like to see Nintendo localize more of their smaller games (their RPGs, anything from Skip, and niche titles like Disaster or Reginleiv) it's understandable that they are apprehensive as they would probably be losing money on at least some of them...

What I really wish was if there was some cheaper way for them to bring some of these experiences to the western market, both in order to gage interest as well as please the fans. Something like downloadable versions with only minimal localization (menu translations, sub-titles at most), or even games that can only be purchased by request so as not to manufacture more then you are going to sell (these could come in a "budget" box or with no manual to lower expenses)... I guess we need to make some noise in order for this kind of thing to happen...