Super Smash Bros coming to Switch in 2018

[MTZehvor]

Wyrdness said:

MTZehvor said:

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.

Go and read Sakurai's recent tweet and his last statement about when he was taking a break, back in 2016 he said his next project was already decided as he was returning and his recent tweet he says he's been working on the game everyday, nothing you've said here debunks what I posted as when this game releases later this year it would be near enough 4 years which with an engine already available is more than enough time. As I said XBC2 with the same engine as XBX was made with half the team in 3 years so the same is possible with Smash, DLC doesn't require the whole studio.

Your comment about marketing doesn't make much sense tbh because the whole marketing for the Switch has been different and it's been for the better Smash is a big enough title it doesn't need years to hype up it's the biggest fighting game franchise around.

First, I quite literally addressed what you said the very first point of my post. Developing DLC on the scale that Smash 4 had does take resources, so at best you're getting a year and a half + two sorta kinda years. This would be a dev cycle much shorter than anything seen for the series since Melee, and while I'll freely admit it doesn't rule it out as a possibility, it makes me highly skeptical.

Second, Sakurai jumping back in essentially as soon as Smash 4 DLC was done is something else that points to this either being a port or an expansion of some sort, kind of like UMvC3 or Ultra Street Fighter IV. It would be much easier to get someone to agree to work on bringing over a pre-existing game rather than starting anew because it's far less work. Developing a new engine isn't really much of the challenge behind making Smash games anyway, as they've all used essentially the same engine with minor tweaks.

Finally, the marketing point is just silly. Just because it's on a different console doesn't mean you throw out the rules of successful marketing. Video games of comparable size or bigger than Smash in terms of sales announce themselves at least a year before their release; Zelda, GTA, RDR, Elder Scrolls, etc. In fact, basically the only games with similar or larger sales numbers that don't do that are annual releases, and that's an issue of "can't" rather than "won't." This is all done because it's beneficial for marketing, which in turn improves sales, and that doesn't change whether you're selling a game on the Switch, PS4, or a smoothie maker.