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MTZehvor on 08 March 2018
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Wyrdness said:
Lonely_Dolphin said:

It's safe to say Smash wont be using the free update strategy a.k.a. releasing the game while it's still being developed, thus my Mario Kart example is the better comparison. Of course not the whole studio, but it obviously means the game is gonna take longer to make without the aforementioned shortcuts.

They already have a game engine so why is 4 years too short? XBC2 reused an engine and made new assets for a new game in 3 with half the team.

Several reasons.

First, it's not really four years. Smash 4 was still being worked on with DLC up until 2016, and while in this hypothetical scenario they could have split the dev team between working on a new game and DLC, it'd still be a limited effort for the first two years.

Second, Masahiro Sakurai was so exhausted at the end of Smash 4 development that he quite literally said he was considering quitting video game development. Either Nintendo would have had to somehow convince him to come back basically immediately after that and make anew Smash game, or basically immediately find a new director who could somehow have a new game out within two years of the last one being supported.

Finally and somewhat unrelated to development, this kind of approach to marketing really just doesn't make sense for Smash. Smash, like most fighting games, tends to use a long lead-in period before release to build up hype with new character announcements and trailers. A game scheduled for 2018 would have a grand total of eight or so months to build up hype, and I can't imagine Nintendo shorting such a big hitter with that little marketing time.