Why not make X into a big Nintendo franchise?

[TheKoreanGuy]

osed125 said:

pokoko said:

He's right about that.  Xenoblade got more word-of-mouth and consumer advertising than just about any other game last gen.  Honestly, NoA was absolutely foolish not to play that up as much as possible in an attempt to catch lightning in a bottle.  Seriously, they blew a golden chance.  People who had zero interest in most JRPGs were talking about Project Rainfall.  Final Fantasy games are basically the only other JRPGs that people who don't play JRPGs are often interested in.  You can't buy that kind of advertising and Nintendo ignored it.

My personal theory as to why Nintendo didn't took the chance was because of piracy. First, for some weird reason, Nintendo took waaay too long to decide if they wanted to publish the game or not, and by the time they made the decision the game was already pirated to no end, heck according to this, the game was downloaded nearly 1 million times in 2011. It doesn't matter which company you are, this kind of numbers are no big incentive and this is likely the reason why the game had a limited print. 

As far as I know, Xenoblade is probably the only game ever where the illegal downloads are much higher than the actual sales.

That's Nintendo's own fault. Make the content available and pirating rates will drop. It's already been proven to work. It's their own fault for not putting more trust in their software in the first place.