Well its been what a week since the delay of Brawl was announced and I thought it was suicide. Nintendo delaying  its most anticipated title, in the face of competition like Halo3 I was utterily stunned to hear Brawl would be a no show. However after further thinking I realized Nintendo may actually be on to something.

 Halo3 while it has been doing extremely well and even pushing massive volumes of hardware it has been innaffective at actually trumping Nintendo by more then a few thousand units. This means that even Halo is unable to beat Nintendo this fall. The longevity of the hardware alone without solid software support has proven extremely suprising. Most consoles with the lack of quality third party titles and few first party titles would have DreamCasted ages ago but the innovation of Wii has enabled it to do what no other console could sell utter crap. 

The last console to manage to sell this well without solid first party support was the PS2. Fact is with the Wii selling itself so well why bother releasing your big AAA+ title. With SuperMarioGalaxy being released next month Nintendo has no reason to rush Brawl along for the holiday season.

What will benefit from Brawl not being on store shelves this fall. Nintendo's own younger IP's like BattalionWars which is bound to garner far more attention without Brawls competition being one of the few Wifi enabled titles. Sonic&Mario at the Olympics will also benefit because of Sonic's appearance in Brawl the two titles would have been in direct competition this fall which would have affected S&M at the Olympics. Other titles like Donkey Kong Barrel Blast would also benefit as gamers are going to be despiratly looking for entertainment.

 In the end Brawl will be released shortly before MarioKart. This will give Nintendo a massive edge over the competition next spring. We also know that Nintendo held back this year only announcing two new games at E3. That means Nintendo has a lot of unnanounced titles set for release next year.

I bet you Nintendo is making a premptive move to avoid the Wii from dropping once the novelty of innovation wares off! 

Screw the console war... I want BRAWL!!

No, it's not.

It got delayed because they couldn't get the game done in time.

Brawl is probably the number one anticipated title of 2007, pretty much tying with Super Mario Galaxy. They pissed off a ton of people by delaying it, but not too badly because it's only a couple months.

They gave us a SPECIFIC date earlier this year, and Reggie promised us "not next year, not next spring," but December 3rd of this year. They were completely planning on releasing it this year...it just fell behind, that's all.

Brawl could have sold a LOT of software units if it made it in time for the holidays.

But even with its February date, it'll sell a lot, and yes, it'll be beneficial for Nintendo because it'll give them a AAA first party title in the beginning of '08.

A delay because of production isn't that bad for Nintendo, but it's not like they planned it...

I'm with BK on this one. Although its (by accident?) a good thing for Nintendo to shift the title in the long-run - you can bet the title was delayed simply because it wasn't ready. An extra month of development at this stage, can be pretty significant.

Realistically speaking a decision to delay a game like Smash Bros. is never made without looking at multiple factors ... If the Wii did not have Super Mario Galaxy, didn't have as large of a third party line-up, and wasn't selling as well as it is I'm pretty sure that Nintendo wouldn't have delayed Smash Bros.

Now, the reason to delay Smash Bros. was probably because there was doubts about whether the game would be completed, tested and bug free in time to make the holiday season; early December was pushing the envelope anyways and the delay of a week (or so) would have lost a lot of sales. By pushing it out until early 2008 they don't have to worry about how many bugs are in the game they're releasing and they (probably) don't lose any sales for Smash Bros. or the Wii over the holiday season.

@n64dan,
No! Spreading out the titles is good for them perhaps...but you're completely ignoring the holiday season...it'd really be better to release Brawl in December for software sales anyway.

To stretch out the AAA titles, sure, that's good, but it's a result of a production delay, NOT because Nintendo just felt like delaying Brawl to keep some distance between their titles.

So Wii Mario Kart should come out in May then?

I think part of the reason for the delay is the developers actually listening to the demand for expanded online options and such. This will likely be the only Smash Bros. game of its generation (like the others), and it has some EXTREMELY big shoes to fill considering that Melee has logged hundreds of hours of play time from many people and is frequently mentioned in all-time favorites lists. There would be great disappointment from the fanbase if the game is anything less than spectacular, and I think the delay will ensure the developers have the opportunity to succeed.