Was Dk:Tropical Freeze's Difficulty the main reason it did not sell that well?

[MikeRox]

spurgeonryan said:

Yes, I know that the Wii U is struggling, but lets look at this games sales. Even with the Wii Selling over 100 million units, Donkey Kong Country Returns still was not able to beat the SNES version. Remember the SNES version? It came out at the end of the SNES lifecycle, yet still did glorious numbers! Also let us remember that America was not really digging the SNES compared to the NES. It dropped like 10 million units compared with the NES. Even the N64 version of DK was able to sell more than the DKCR, but let's face it. Rare is a better Nintendo developer than Nintendo. Am I right?

There's also the fact that DCK was a technological marvel more akin to what will be the best looking PS4/X1 games in the next couple of years. Although "only" a 2D platformer, back then it was the business. First game to have CG rendered visuals, which were actually being called 3D at the time because the game was full of 3D renders for the models and backgrounds. There was a hell of a lot of exposure for it at the time, entire sections of TV shows documenting the techniques used to make the graphics etc on prime time TV. It had a lot more buzz.

Tropical Freeze is pretty, but it's "just" a 2D platformer rendered in 3D now. Plus the British just make better games :p

Chuck in the low userbase and current oversaturation of platformers (particularly in comparison to other genres on Wii U) and I don't think it was ever going to do the numbers some were expecting. When Wii U gets down to a mass market price and a bigger audience comes, I see it continuing to chug along for the next few years though.