Iwata Asks: Splatoon

[DivinePaladin]

sundin13 said:

Pavolink said:

On the other hand, releasing a game lacking on content (1/3) could also spread firstly a bad impression and people skiping it. Because of that, your current userbase could be as low as to make the the first players get early bored. Thus, they will lost any future interest in the game and won't bother with the subsecuents modes months after.

I guess we will see how will people react to it.

It could and that is a very real risk. Evolve went the route of releasing low on content and trying to keep people going with post release content (although they charged for their post release content) and its user base dropped extremely quickly. It all comes down to how you release content and if you release it at a pace that lines up with when people begin getting tired of the current content.

That said, a lot of people are making this strategy out to be evil or terrible, but while there is potential risk, there is also potential reward and it could end up making the experience better for day one buyers. We will see how it plays out, but I think that judgement should be made a few months after release instead of immediately just saying that it is stupid and the game should have been delayed

I don't think any option really makes it definitively better for day one adopters. Personally, I see a strong middle ground happening with Splatoon: Some people will burn out because one new map a week is actually TOO much, others will become addicts, etc. I personally would've preferred them to just throw a couple more maps into the base game and spread out the new maps a bit more. One every other week or every three weeks, with like five more maps at launch, would've been ideal. The only reason I can see for them not doing that is to tweak the dlc maps to the playerbase's tendencies a bit (remove clear camping opportunities, inevitable glitch spots, advantages, etc.) to ensure that later maps are better than the launch ones. If that's the case I'm fine with it. 

 

It's gonna remain to be seen how the reviews go with Splatoon and if reviewers continue to update the reviews as the game evolves. Since this probably isn't a game that'll have a broken launch (MCC), and it's not a huge blockbuster (Destiny), I don't see that happening. So the Nintendo fans are going to have to push this game for Nintendo this time, as the reviews probably won't help out this time.