Nintendo sucks at marketing its older-teen blockbusters

[NightDragon83]

Mr Khan said:

NightDragon83 said:
Wow, those are some sad numbers for Prime 3, arguably the best in the series. The Wii sold a bajillion units, yet MP3 couldn't even come close to 2 mil WW, and couldn't even break 1mil here in the US.

The OP is spot on about Nintendo's marketing and advertising. Unless you were a hardcore gamer or Ninty fanboy at the time, you had no clue that Prime 3 was coming out on the Wii prior to its release because there was NO advertising of any kind until the week of its release. Nintendo was even criticized for this point blank by many gaming journalists for years, and yet they still went ahead with their policy of 1: not revealing new games until it's within months of their release date (which means no hype buildup at all), and 2: not advertising their games at all unless it has Mario, Pokemon, or Wii in the title.

For further proof, just look at the Wii U. We didn't get any concrete info on the console's price, launch date and launch titles until TWO MONTHS before launch, and heading into 2013, aside from Pikmin 3 and Bayonetta, we have absolutely NO IDEA what Nintendo or even 3rd parties have planned for the Wii U after January or February. Meanwhile if you're a PS360 gamer, you know of plenty of AAA titles coming out for your console of choice in just the first half of 2013 alone, like new Gears, God of War, The Last of Us, Metro Last Light, Bioshock 3, GTAV, etc.

What the hell is Nintendo's PR and marketing department DOING???!?!?!?

I think the idea is to avoid Last Guardian/Versus XIII/Dragon Quest X/Agent type debacles. You don't want to create hype for a project, and then see it fall through for whatever reason, then have to deal with backlash. Better to wait until the game is really ready to go, in their mind.

I don't agree with it either, but i do think that's the justification. The problem with that strategy is that if you don't show people that you're doing something, they'll assume that you're doing nothing.

Well there hasn't really been that many high profile Nintendo games that were unveiled at some point and then delayed for years on end.  Most major releases going all the way back to the SNES days were only delayed for a year or two tops.  There were N64 launch games like Goldeneye that got delayed a year, Banjo was delayed from '97 to June '98, Paper Mario was shown earlier on in the N64's life as SMRPG2 in 98 or 99 (around the same time as the original version of Conker too), and both were delayed till early 2001.  Those are about the longest delayed 1st party Nintendo games that were officially unveiled at some point that I can remember, and that's nothing compared to some of the high profile delays we've seen just during this gen alone like the ones you mentioned.

I have no problem with Nintendo showing off games that are about a year or so away from release, but to not show off anything until mere months before they're set to launch doesn't help them at all, in fact it does alot more harm than good because "core" gamers not only look at the current software library of a particular console but upcoming titles as well when deciding on which console they should pick up.  Like lets say you were trying to decide between PS3 and 360, and you had no idea that exclusives like GoW and The Last of Us were coming out for the PS3, nor were you sure if it was actually going to get 3rd party games like GTAV and Bioshock 3, and these are the types of games that you enjoy the most over any other series or genres... which console do you think you'd be more likely to pick up in that case?

This is the dillema that many "core" gamers are facing when deciding on whether or not they should get a Wii U, because 1) they have no idea what exclusives are coming out for the system in the next 6-12 months aside from Pikmin and Bayonetta, and 2) they don't even know which major 3rd party games are coming to the system during that same period.  Sure 3D Mario, Zelda, Metroid, DK, Smash etc are eventually coming to the system at some point, but that could be anywhere from a year to as much as 5 or more for any one of those franchises... took 6 years between Zelda releases on the Wii for example, and it's been 5 years since the last Smash and Metroid and still no official sign of either one.