Super Smash Bros coming to Switch in 2018

[MTZehvor]

pikashoe said:

MTZehvor said:

The case of Odyssey is a bit different, since Nintendo had already announced they were working on a new Mario game beforehand. Additionally, the first footage of both of those games was just to advertise the Switch, not really to market the individual titles themselves. I don't believe there's an instance of a trailer like what we got for Smash which just flat out says nothing about the game at all.

I wasn't trying to say that all those games were announced at the same time, just that there was a period of time where all those titles had been announced but not yet released. In other words, Nintendo has shown no qualms about having a bunch of unreleased titles in public view.

I'm not really sure how you can say that Nintendo has announced few Switch games far from launch. BotW, Prime 4, Pokemon, Fire Emblem, Yoshi, all announced at least a year in advance of their launch. In fact, out of the list of "major" titles that Nintendo is developing/has developed for Switch, I'd argue the ones announced at least a year in advance outnumber those not (Splatoon 2 and maybe Arms). Even if you ignore the director announcing it and count SMO in the latter category, what other big Switch titles has Nintendo announced so close to launch?

My reasons are pretty much what was in my previous post; announcing a Smash game this close to launch doesn't make much sense from a marketing standpoint or from a historical precedent standpoint. Smash Bros, and fighting games in general, tend to like to give themselves a good deal of time to accentuate the different characters that will be in their game. This goes doubly so for Smash, which, in the last two installments at least, has made use of guest characters to generate excitement. Let's assume that they don't say anything more about this until E3, which I think is a safe bet. Nintendo will have left themselves with 5 months, at most, to show off probably a dozen plus new characters. Previous Smash games have always been very intentional about giving themselves plenty of time to show off new characters and have had great success sales-wise; it seems odd that a new game would entirely abandon this philosophy and basically limit itself to less than half the time. I don't think there's a particularly good reason as to why they'd only drop this trailer now, rather than say have this trailer closer to the start of 2017 and show off gameplay at E3. If it's far enough along in development to be ready to ship by this Fall, there almost assuredly had to have been gameplay ready to show by last June.

There's also something to be said for historical precedent on how Smash games have been developed; namely that Sakurai's always gotten at least a short break between working on entries. He'd pretty much have to start working on Smash 5 as soon as Smash 4 development was finished in order for this game to be released in 2018, all the while working on the new Kirby title. I know Sakurai gets some flack for saying "I'm not doing this anymore," and then continuing to develop Smash games, but I find it hard to believe that someone who sounded as miserable as he did after Smash 4 wrapped up would be willing to immediately jump back in to the same cycle.

Botw was announced for an entirely different console. Arms, splatoon 2, xenoblade 2, fire emblem warriors, labo kits, Kirby star allies, Mario and rabbids kingdom battle, 1-2 switch all of these were released less than a year after being announced. If we add the 3ds into the mix, various Pokemon games, metroid, fire emblem echoes, that new warioware game off the top of my head. Nintendo have been doing this a lot recently.

Looking at the huge reaction to this trailer online can you honestly say they need to spend more than 5 months marketing this. They could tell us nothing but a release date and the game would still sell extremely well at launch.

As for historical precedent every smash since melee has been in development for at least a year before a new consoles release. The wiiu getting replaced quicker than usual would explain why smash is coming out quicker than past entries. Also sakurai hasn't worked on a Kirby game in years, the last time was well over 10 years ago. He hasn't been working on anything since the last smash. The last piece of DLC to come out was in February 2016, he could have taken 6 months off and started working on smash switch in August 2016 which would gives them 2 years and 3 months if the game releases November 2018. Roughly the same amount it took to make brawl. What makes this more likely is the failure of the wiiu.

Regardless of what BotW was announced for, it was still planned to be released more than a year from its release date.

I believe I already mentioned this, but games like Pokemon and Kirby generally can't be announced more than a year before their launch because either their development time isn't long enough to allow for it, or there's another title that would make advertising tricky (you won't see Call of Duty advertising next year's game despite it presumably being in development now because marketing efforts are on BO4). Most of those other games are...definitely not on the level of something like Smash to the point where you would want to devote a long time period towards hyping them up (Labo? Really?). Point being that when it comes to Nintendo's big series, they tend to give them more space, so to speak, if it's available.

Yes, I can say that, because while generating excitement within the community of consumers that keep up to date with video game related news is great, it's not the sole determinant of whether a game sells well or not. Games rely heavily on sales from demographics that aren't necessarily immediately familiar with their franchises, or more to the point, won't instantly purchase a game just based on name recognition. There's a reason why even games that have traditionally sold better than Smash Bros. focus heavily on extended ad campaigns; Grand Theft Auto, 3D Console Mario titles, Halo, etc. You can win over the people that aren't as attached to Smash as we might be. 

While all of that is interesting, I don't think it really addresses the initial point that Sakurai's always gotten breaks...as in at least a couple of years, before getting thrown back into making Smash. Six months isn't exactly a ton of time, and I find it far less likely that he'd agree to starting on an entirely new game that quickly, as opposed to a scenario where he gets asked to come back and make an updated version of Smash 4 with some new characters/stages/enough new content to really push it for Nintendo's major 2018 release.