| naznatips said: Interesting analysis, but I have a few issues. 1.) Mario certainly is not guaranteed a 5th character. Yoshi and Wario are their own franchises remember. Mario really doesn't have any good options for a 5th either. Geno would be the best, and all rights to Geno are owned by Square, so Nintendo would have to fight for him... However, that said, looking at the video now, I'd say there are in fact 5 spots per sticker page. The fact that there were only 4 Pokemon though despite there being 5 spots knocks out Mewtwo completely. 2.) Donkey Kong is far more popular than Star Fox or F-Zero now. March of the Minis sold 1.5 million copies, which is more than any SF or F-Zero games has sold since the N64. Diddy Kong Racing did great as well (too lazy to check, but it was over 1 million if I remember right). Sales aren't really the only factors here either. You have to think of where there are options for spots. K. Rool is a natural fit, and I consider him very likely. 3.) F-Zero has awful sales, but I agree Deathborn is possible, and I'll update him on my odds chart in a minute. In general thoguh I think your logic is flawed. Sakurai will expand where he has options, not necessarily based on just popularity. Obviously Mario and Pokemon both had popularity and lots of options, but the other franchises are a free for all of filling spots where you find them. There isn't some sales analysis breakdown being done to determine these slots. They are being determined by viable characters to fill them. |
I mistakenly put Yoshi in with the Mario franchise before. I accept that I may have underrated Donkey Kong. I should have predicated F-Zero getting two characters on the common assumption that Fire Emblem will get two characters again. I felt that they were roughly equal since F-Zero had pretty good sales in the past and an anime series, but has now dwindled substantially while Fire Emblem has always had a small but faithful following.
I am certain that at some time during the development process, the team has spent a week or more in a room with a whiteboard listing candidates for inclusion and dividing them up into definites and maybes. And in such a process, the question of does that series deserve to have n characters when this series has m is bound to come up repeatedly.
I don't think that any decisions were made purely on sales, but rather sales can be used as evidence (but not proof) of the strength of fan following for a series. Some series have weak to middling sales but strong fan following (e.g. Fire Emblem and Earthbound). I tend to assume that any game's following is roughly proportional to the number of people in forums using that game's characters as their avatars.
Melee seems to have had a much more straightforward character selection process. I think they just started with the most popular Nintendo characters, plus some characters from minor titles to mix things up. The result was that they had four Mario characters (well five if you count Yoshi with the Mario group), three Pokemon characters, two Zelda characters, and one character each from a bunch of other series. Then late in the development process they added six clone characters which skewed things.
I think the inclusion of King Dedede is evidence that with Brawl they've shifted to thinking of things in terms of how much representation to give each series. I don't think he would make the cut if the choices were made purely by his popularity. Rather, I think he was included because the Kirby series is popular enough to warrant a stronger representation in Brawl.
