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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Tomonobu Itagaki on Why Devil's Third Underperformed

Some interesting parts in there:

I generally don't like to badmouth people and I have nothing but appreciation toward Nintendo for releasing Devil's Third. However, I don't believe that they gave this game their best effort in promoting and selling the game. At the same time, I also understand their position… I don't have any resentment toward the sales team at Nintendo U.S. It's natural for them to have made the decisions they made. But, I do realize that there was a shortage and I addressed this to Nintendo many times.

 

Let me explain this in parts. First, the reason the reviews were so poor. I have analyzed the reason. This game was designed to be a massive shooter, so it would be fun if there were at least a thousand players in the game. But Nintendo didn't set up online matches for reviewers. So there was no way for reviewers to experience the online mode as we designed it, and they reviewed the game based mostly on the single-player story mode. If it had been Microsoft that had published the game, they would have given the game to a group of 500 players who had signed an NDA to play for the reviewers to experience the massive online mode. But NOA didn't do that.

Looks like another disappointed 3rd party studio.

So I don't blame the reviewers for underestimating the experience of the online mode. There's no value to the review of someone who's evaluating a piece of art with blindfolds on. That was 95 percent of the negative criticism toward the game. The remaining 5 percent was by people who wanted to build credibility by criticising the game. And this is my assumption, but one person wrote a negative review and NOA didn't do anything to stop or change the review, so others followed suit. So I don't really believe that the reviews were credible. Although I haven't read all the reviews, the reviews I saw were not very objective, more emotional.

Looks like another disappointed 3rd party studio.



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

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Have not played the game, but videos I watched of others playing showed a game that was demonstrably, laughably bad in some fundamental areas. Amateur hour stuff. Especially as it pertains to the campaign. I did watch some multi-player that looked ok, but even then it seemed pretty bland. Maybe I'm wrong, but many, and really most of it's players didn't seem impressed. So were they too emotional as well? Guy's a bit of a blowhard imo, and Team Ninja seems to be thriving without him, just as I predicted.



- "If you have the heart of a true winner, you can always get more pissed off than some other asshole."



I enjoyed the game, but its not a very polished one. The fact that Nintendo released it in its current state at all kinda surprise me.



To sum it up, he basically says it's Nintendo's fault too.



God bless You.

My Total Sales prediction for PS4 by the end of 2021: 110m+

When PS4 will hit 100m consoles sold: Before Christmas 2019

There were three ravens sat on a tree / They were as blacke as they might be / The one of them said to his mate, Where shall we our breakfast take?


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Barkley said:

Why are you posting a random N64 screenshot?



- "If you have the heart of a true winner, you can always get more pissed off than some other asshole."

vivster said:

Some interesting parts in there:

I generally don't like to badmouth people and I have nothing but appreciation toward Nintendo for releasing Devil's Third. However, I don't believe that they gave this game their best effort in promoting and selling the game. At the same time, I also understand their position… I don't have any resentment toward the sales team at Nintendo U.S. It's natural for them to have made the decisions they made. But, I do realize that there was a shortage and I addressed this to Nintendo many times.

 

Let me explain this in parts. First, the reason the reviews were so poor. I have analyzed the reason. This game was designed to be a massive shooter, so it would be fun if there were at least a thousand players in the game. But Nintendo didn't set up online matches for reviewers. So there was no way for reviewers to experience the online mode as we designed it, and they reviewed the game based mostly on the single-player story mode. If it had been Microsoft that had published the game, they would have given the game to a group of 500 players who had signed an NDA to play for the reviewers to experience the massive online mode. But NOA didn't do that.

Looks like another disappointed 3rd party studio.

So I don't blame the reviewers for underestimating the experience of the online mode. There's no value to the review of someone who's evaluating a piece of art with blindfolds on. That was 95 percent of the negative criticism toward the game. The remaining 5 percent was by people who wanted to build credibility by criticising the game. And this is my assumption, but one person wrote a negative review and NOA didn't do anything to stop or change the review, so others followed suit. So I don't really believe that the reviews were credible. Although I haven't read all the reviews, the reviews I saw were not very objective, more emotional.

Looks like another disappointed 3rd party studio.

So in other words this game should have been published by MS cause Nintendo are hopeless.



I own, played, and beat the game as well as experienced the online on Wii U. The game is fun, nonsense story, ridiculus gameplay, etc. The game is massively underrated, and its entertainment value is definitely under appreciated by critics.



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think-man said:

So in other words this game should have been published by MS cause Nintendo are hopeless.

Microsoft replies: "Thank you very much, but we wouldn't have resources to publish this wonderful game. Please, contact Sony."



God bless You.

My Total Sales prediction for PS4 by the end of 2021: 110m+

When PS4 will hit 100m consoles sold: Before Christmas 2019

There were three ravens sat on a tree / They were as blacke as they might be / The one of them said to his mate, Where shall we our breakfast take?


0D0 said:
think-man said:

So in other words this game should have been published by MS cause Nintendo are hopeless.

Microsoft replies: "Thank you very much, but we wouldn't have resources to publish this wonderful game. Please, contact Sony."

Sony - "While the title shows great potential we don't believe it would be a good fit with our ecosystem, Here's Sega's number."

Sega - "We're desperate."