Lawlight said:
I'm sure marketing will be higher than $40M for this game. If they can spend Mario Kart level of marketing money on Splatoon, imagine how much they'd spend on this. |
They won't separately market the game. They'll incorporate the game as a centrepiece of marketing the NX itself.
wombat123 said:
It's not that Nintendo is immune from derivitive games; look at the NSMB series (or even Pokemon) for example. The difference to me is that Nintendo doesn't have to spend a fortune to try and get people to buy some of their IPs that tend to recycle an established formula without adding much else or be released fairly frequently. |
But you see, Nintendo knows how to make small changes to a game that actually make a big difference. NSMB and Pokemon are both great examples of that.
Each Mario Bros 2D platformer title has made some small, but significant changes. That, in combination with the top-notch gameplay you can expect from Nintendo (especially their Mario Bros titles), and you get huge sales.
In the case of Pokemon, each generation introduces something that is subtle, but fundamentally changes something about the games.
It doesn't take an overhaul to keep an IP fresh. It just requires tweaks to the fundamentals (not to the superficials). This doesn't mean an overhaul can't be beneficial, once in a while (see Zelda, for example) - and sometimes, an overhaul creates a spinoff series (see classic 3D Mario, the Mario 3D series, the Mario & Luigi titles, etc).
When people talking about the "established formula" of an IP, they tend to focus on the superficial - Mario saves Peach, Link saves Hyrule by working through dungeons, etc. But those aren't the formulae, those are the frameworks. The formula for an IP has to do with how it actually plays. It is the experience of playing, the details of the underlying design (not character/story/setting design).
People often praise the "change in the formula" of Majora's Mask... but they're always talking about the fact that it's not Link saving Zelda in a relatively lighthearted Hyrule, but a dark and crapsack world where Link has to save hylian life itself. But that's not the way they changed the formula. The framework (which people keep describing as the "Zelda formula") was the same - go to dungeon, find item, defeat dungeon using item, lather, rinse, repeat. But what really changed was the mechanics being used within the game. Changing up the character's behaviour using the masks, the time-limitation enforced by the 3 day cycle, the time-planning around the bombers' notebook and quest design, it was all tweaks to gameplay that made it fresh.
Twilight Princess was a similarly dark and crapsack-ish place, but people compare it with Ocarina of Time, not Majora's Mask. Why? Because a lot more of the gameplay resembled Ocarina of Time. And yet, lots of people love the game, and it was the best-selling Zelda at the time (OoT has since returned to the top, through OoT3D), because it still felt fresh, thanks to gameplay.
