I often viewed Pikmin as big. And Ithink what the thread was trying to get at was budget size and marketing size for a game. Last year was no joke, this year was. This year pretty much has mario maker and xenoblade only. Splatoon, star fox, and yoshi are budget games

We need to define the term "big game" before we continue with this debate.

Yep. One interesting thing is that May looks like now to be the release date of one of their big games. (2014 MK, 2015 Splatoon).

This would be right if it wasn't wrong.

" Big game " means nothing nowadays, a small game on PS3 would have been a big game on PS2, and nowadays a lot of indies are as big as some of last gen retail games ( Wild and Rime come in mind)

Nintendo games will look small for some compared to games on PS4/One, but on Wii U level, they are big games

I'm pretty sure they already stated that Xenoblade is going to get a huge marketing push in the west.

MHU3 was actually an HD version of Wii game that happened to have a 3DS companion game. Not that that is really important.

I'm sorry to say, but if the production and marketing budgets is how we should make the destinction, then none of us are able to say which games are "big" or not.

Firstly, no threshhold is set for when something is "big", secondly, we don't know any of the budgets, for production or for marketing.

We can make guesses, based on how the games appear to us, but these guessses can very easily be incorrect.

Personally I would imagine the budget for Yoshi's Wooly World to be considerably higher than Mario Maker, based on how many 3D assets have had to be created, and how many new game play mechanics have needed both design, programming, and testing.

But I don't actually know.

Yeah, one in around May and one Holiday.

Well, this actually brings up a fundamental problem with the thread, specifically that many people have different interpretations of the word "big."

The word big can be used to refer to budget (marketing and/or developmental), final sales, reviews, new concepts/ip, sequel in a famous series, the quality of the developer involved, the quantity of the time used to make the game, or a combination of all of this.

I am referring to big through budget (both marketing and development). You are right in saying that games dont often reveal their budget size, but it's not to difficult to make educated guesses. Destiny for example was easy to determine as big budget given the advertisement. And later it was confirmed to have a half billion dollar budget. Destiny is what I would call a "big" game.

However, it would also be a mistake to say a game is either "big" or not "big," there is a grey zone. Clearly not every game is Destiny level big, but there are games that come close. Super Smash bros, and Mario kart are great examples. But as the wii u drags on, Nintendo has made it clear that they will very rarely make games to the scale of mario kart and smash bros. Mario Maker was probably made on a budget (or not as level editors capable of producing near retail levels is not too easy), but the marketing budget will probably make it waaay bigger than yoshi's wolly world. Likewise, the development budget and marketing budget for Xeno X is also probably no joke. 

This is why I say that Xeno X and mario maker are the only "big" games of the year. You are free to disagree, but know that everyone has a different definition of what "big" means.