Let's put it this way: The 2 hours I spent with LIMBO were good enough not to feel ripped off, but I could totally understand someone who does not care about the atmosphere being disappointed.

Once again, crunch the numbers at $30 Nintendo would have made less money with NSMBW.

I certainly wish they were a little less, but people keep buying em, so I doubt they'll drop any time soon...

Basically, when you put it that way, NSMB as a series is doomed to fail on a Nintendo console, seriously I'm not even kidding.

They can't generate higher HW sales due to their HW strat, they can't mark down the price due to the attach rate issue so they're left overpricing their games and lowering their forecasts.

Seriously why not make games that take less time to make (since SMB is still played today and has tremendous retail value), have a shorter first-run duration (since they're replayable after all), and just pump out more games with new concepts and stay relevant.

In other words I am not optimistic about NSMB and other retro games priced at 40 to 60$ a pop. It's a thing of the past imho.

Kind of what I mean by "thinking outside the box".

I don't believe that the NSMB series is becoming a failure. considering NSMB 2 is probably over 7 million if including download sales and NSMBU is close to 2M(including download sales) when the system has only sold about 2.5M.

Look man, it's a forum on sales and business strategy of video games, at least I think it is. If I didn't have this kind of opinion, my honest opinion, why would we be here in the first place, just to rub each others' backs and maintain status quo? It takes enormous amounts of effort and patience to have a good, decent conversation on here. We got to it, but it took 5 pages more or less to break down the pre-conceptions of what I appear to be saying/doing.

Each game brings in a part of the userbase. Wii wouldn't have reached 100m with only NSMB-like games.

And I don't believe the U will with the same SW strat as the Wii. The novelty is gone, the market is much more competitive. The games they made are all based on the same trad strategy, but they are diluting their efforts into games that take a long time to finish when people only play a quarter of them, in the mass market, I would presume. I'm a gamer and I had a hard time staying entertained.

We're in the fast-paced, fast-food, click and play society, it isn't the old day anymore. Don't like a game, play another one. Didn't like a game, it gets ignored. Liked a game, tell your friends!

The NSMB games could easily be 2 hour offerings sold at a much cheaper price, with many more games sold in a cornucopia of games. For today's market that's how you win.

I'll take an example from a market that's frowned upon: pornography. Lately the trend has been for 15 minute High-Quality videos against the traditional 40 to 50 minute sex clips.

The reason behind that is exactly what I was talking about above: people nowadays get bored fast, and are "done" much sooner than they were before. There will always be room for 20-60 hour games, but not in the retro market imho it can't sustain that kind of design, game and business design wise.

Cant quote im on an ipad..

But happydolphin you know that nintendo couldnt go back up in price? Like my gta5 example, the market doesnt like that price increase. Overpricing and underpricing are the same conversation.. Cause it all depends on the market... If nintendo went down with NSMBU at 10 bucks, and then for NSMBU2 they spend 5x times the budget.. And then they tried rightfully to sell it or 50 bucks.. Do you think the market would accept that? Them not knowing the production costs.. They would think its overpriced compared to the prior version? Do you think then they would sell many NSMBU2s? By lowering your price, you could hurt the market view, just the same as overpricing something.. It would hurt future investments..

Iook at the app store.. Its taking years for people to accept games at 4.99 instead of 99 cents.. SE is priced at 9.99 and more but most people dont accept that price cause it used to be cheaper.. They don't care that there was a heavier investment in the 9.99 games.. Could SE lower their price? Sure? Would it increase sales? maybe.. Does it hurt their image as a brand? Certainly.. Will it harm the price and budget of future SE ios games? Definitly

I'ld like to think most people's gaming and masturbation habits, or atleast how long they spent on each, were vastly different.