They said from the start that dark souls was a port. They didn't just drop a cg trailer and say nothing.

There isn't much point in comparing Nintendo's past marketing of smash, there marketing is just so different now. This may be more like the marketing of Pokemon. Which for the last few games has had announcement trailer early in the year and is then marketed throughout that year. Pokemon games have potentially over 100 characters to advertise with each game.

Looking at a lot of recent announcements the gap between the first teaser and the game coming out has been pretty small. Kirby announced at June 2017, released March 2018. Fire emblem warriors January 2017, released September 2017. Xenoblade 2 announced January 2017, released December 2017. 

The problem with showing off smash too early is that it could distract a lot from other games. Just look at this direct, I've barely heard a word about anything but smash. 

Unless a game is stated as a port there is absolutely no reason to believe it is a port.

We're shifting ground a bit here, going from "no ports are announced without gameplay" to "no ports are announced without stating they're ports," but all right. Regardless, there aren't a ton of instances where a company drops a trailer for a new game without stating that it's a new title, either.

I can agree with the notion of "unless it's stated as a port, there's no reason to believe it is a port," if you only look at the way a game is announced as your basis for determination. If this trailer had dropped and said "releasing 2019," then I would fully expect a new game as well. But you can't look exclusively at the way a trailer is framed to determine whether it's a game or not, which leads us into the marketing points.

I can fully agree with smaller titles that often having difficulty maintaining interest over long spans of development time, especially Warriors. But even titles like Xenoblade give themselves generally at least a year to market before releasing in the hopes they can build up interest, and the same generally applies to Nintendo's larger/well recognized IPs. Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, Metroid Prime 4, Fire Emblem 16, all announced well before their release. In the latter two cases, Nintendo went out of their way to announce the game's existence before even a CGI trailer was available. The only consistent exception I can think of is series that release new installments so frequently it would be next to impossible to advertise the next game with the same run time that games like Smash have had in the past without infringing on the advertising territory of the previous title. Kirby and Pokemon tend to fall into this category, and it's worth noting that even Pokemon may be moving towards a more long term focused advertisement scheme for their Switch game, which, again, Nintendo went out of their way to tell us was coming before a trailer was even ready.

I won't say that there are no examples of big name Nintendo titles announcing themselves very soon to release; Splatoon 2 comes to mind as the most prominent example, but they're so few and far between and such a departure from how Smash has handled itself in the past it makes me very skeptical that this is an entirely new game.

Finally, the idea of Smash distracting. In 2006, Nintendo had Twilight Princess, Metroid Prime 3, Super Mario Galaxy, and Smash Bros. Brawl all announced with trailers shown at the same time, and every single game sold quite well. This year, they had Super Mario Odyssey, Metroid Prime 4, Pokemon Switch, Fire Emblem 16, and Splatoon 2 all announced at the same time. If Nintendo's particularly concerned about the idea of overshadowing smaller games, they certainly haven't shown it in the past.

I never said no ports have trailers without gameplay, i said most. i'm pretty sure the first footage we got for odyssey and splatoon 2 didnt mention they were new games. Many thought splatoon 2 was a port, they were wrong.

Pokemon no trailer, metroid a logo, fire emblem no trailer. Most of these games weren't announced at the same time. Just look at this year almost everything they've announced is being released very soon. With switch nintendo have announced very few games far from launch. With fire emblem, Pokemon and metroid being the exceptions. Most likely the reason they announced Pokemon so early was to show people where the future of the franchise Is going to be, many were doubting that a core game would release on the system.

What are your reasons for believing this a port? Smash games don't take very long to make. So time shouldn't be an issue here. It seems likely that they would have started working on a new game earlier due to the switch being in development and every smash game since melee has been in development for roughly a year before the new console released. Development for this game should be lot easier due to there being only one version of the game to make. Smash 4 took at most around 2.5 years to make, with 2 versions of the game with a lot of differences. Brawl took a little over 2 years to make. 

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.

Smash 64 released in 1999 and melee released in 2001, That's a 2 year gap between games. I imagine nintendo wants to keep this series as a relatively early title in a consoles life, Considering it has been for every nintendo console since the GameCube.

As for advertising, brawl didn't have that many trailers, they announced most of the new characters in the first trailer. Melee didn't have much of a build up, the original didn't either. The only game that had loads of trailers was smash 4. So it's been very different with most of the games. Maybe they don't want to spoil every thing this time. Maybe there aren't as many new comers, which would make sense the roster is gigantic and there aren't that many iconic characters left to be in this series.