Aeolus451 said:
atomicblue said:
Aeolus451 said:
atomicblue said:
Also want to address this, since I hate that people have this misconception that anything under a million sales is bad.
Nintendo themselves said that they don't spend as much on marketing if they think a game is likely to find its audience anyway (because a lot of Nintendo fans and gamers in general tend to keep up with new releases). I believe the example they used when talking about this was Xenoblade. That lack of marketing spend also means their games don't need to sell anywhere near as much to be profitable; the companies who usually want to sell a bajillion copies of their games are the bigger third-parties (especially Western ones) who blow millions of dollars on global campaigns. Plus, Nintendo don't have to worry about licensing fees when they're self-publishing. Most of this is also true of Sony and Microsoft, which is why those companies are more able to release niche games for their consoles even if they only sell, say, 250k or something like that.
|
It also could mean they don't want to invest heavily in a game that could flop or not do as well or won't sell much beyond the game's fans. Regardless they are holding back on supporting their games in a sense.
|
Not really. They're supporting their games in a way that makes sense financially. Something like Wonderful 101 probably wouldn't sell substantially better with a massive marketing budget, it would just mean the game would lose money for Nintendo. This is why Ubisoft/EA/Activision mostly deal in gritty open-world games or shooters or sports games or movie tie-ins or other "safe" titles, because they're the ones where marketing might encourage Joe Average to buy the game.
If Nintendo's approach were to only make the kind of games that can sustain a massive marketing budget, games like W101 or Bayonetta 2 probably wouldn't exist.
|
They're playing it too safe. If you don't market a product, no one outside of it's fan following will know about it. To presume that no one outside it's fanbase might like the game is completely ignorant from a business standpoint. Nintendo should try to maximize the sales of their products and not just be happy with crappy sales that might turn a profit but won't expand the userbase of it's games.
|
Except that they do market products when they think they'll reach a broader audience. Look at Splatoon, for example - an unknown IP but one that had enough pick-up-and-play qualities to it to appeal to a lot of people. Something like Xenoblade, by contrast, is not a very user-friendly game nor is it a particularly Western game and it's not the sort of thing that would appeal to a lot of people outside of the kind of people who already read gaming websites (which are basically another form of PR anyway).
It would be different if Nintendo put out another "core" game that wasn't in a niche market. If they did a title like Assassin's Creed or Halo or GTA or something with that sort of broad, mass-market appeal, I'd expect them to market it more strongly (like they do with Splatoon, Mario, Mario Kart, Zelda, Metroid, Pokémon and the like). If they did a big marketing push for everything, though, they'd just end up losing more money. It's the same reason Ubisoft didn't blow tens of millions on marketing something like Child of Light.
