| TheMisterManGuy said: Yes, But the difference between what Nintendo does with Mario vs what say, Sega does with Sonic is that Nintendo constantly re-invents and Mario and puts him and his friends in various unconventional games. Sega has done almost nothing but lame gimmicks with Sonic for years, but Nintendo adds genuinely fun and creative gameplay twists to the Mario formula. It also helps that Nintendo only releases a mainline Super Mario game once each generation usually, while Sega releases 2, 3, sometimes 4 mainline Sonic platformers each generation, so it usually doesn't feel tired or worn out since the longer time between main series games gives more room to try and be creative for the next entry. |
I didn't even mention Sega once in my comment, and you didn't really refute that what Capcom is doing with their mainline entries for their games is not really just recycling the same ideas over and over again. Aside from ports (which Nintendo does as well), DMCV, Mega Man 11, Monster Hunter World, and RE7 are all very risky endeavors.
Mega Man 11 is mostly risky just because of the lack of an audience, but if we're talking about not being risk-averse, then that game still fits the bill. DMCV is pretty risky because not only is it a huge game with a massive budget despite the franchise having a very small audience, but there's three separate protagonists with very different playstyles in one game. RE7 took some inspiration from Outlast but after RE5 and RE6 made bank on shlocky action, it's pretty crazy Capcom listened to fans and even went in a horror direction again, not to mention one that wasn't just reusing RE4's gameplay style. And as I've already said, Monster Hunter World is a pretty massive step forward for the franchise.
I guess the biggest problem with your OP is that you're essentially juggling three separate ideas and trying to make them mutually exclusive: Innovation, Risk, and Creativity. While all these ideas gel pretty well together, it makes for an incredibly hard to discuss point. Because any time someone could say "Hey, X company does this pretty well also" you could easily just pull any of the three qualifiers out and say "Nah, they don't fit this specific one". Most indie games are not very creative, but there's still incredible risk in the amount of units the game can sell. When you have a game like Monster Hunter, where the innovation is mostly franchise-specific, well it may fit the bill of Innovation and Risk (it was a huge risk not to stick to handhelds), but does it fit creativity? Not really. But then again, most Nintendo games really only focus on one or two of these aspects, and not all of them combined. In fact, a lot of the Nintendo games that focus on all three end up failing or are quite obscure. Dillon's Rolling Western is pretty obscure, though it has some following. Codename Steam is very obscure. Arms did not sell very well despite initial shipments making it seem like a big new IP. It didn't do bad, but it didn't do great either and it says a lot that Nintendo games which were more creatively bankrupt games ended up selling a lot more. The only big example of this would be Splatoon I suppose, although I would probably put that closer in the "creative" category than the "innovative" one.
Nintendo really does not focus very much at all on their games being both risky, creative, AND innovative at the same time. A lot of their titles fit one bill, or even two, but not all of them. And on that front, a company like Capcom is not that different. Besides their fighting games, they've actually been on a bit of a roll recently. And really, while I focused too much on the Capcom comparison, the ultimate point is that console manufacturers are generally a bit more risky in their game development than other companies. Even Microsoft to some extent. That doesn't mean that Nintendo is very comparable to other companies as the be all end all of anti risk-aversion, it just means they're doing their job as a platform holder.
