*Sigh...I severely dislike when people try to over simplify an argument in the face of their own flawed one to try and demonstrate how their point somehow makes more sense, but here goes.
Yet you've been doing that this entire time. You've oversimplified your entire argument to a single sentence.
"Ridley was implied to be non-playable, so he is disconfirmed."
That's a great little sentence, but it is not exactly a lot to go on.
They only act if there's something to work with. No sign of Ridley's full body what-so-ever means they will not say either way. Chrom also didn't need a deconfirm, it was obvious that he was not going to be playable after the trailer. Rayman only needed one because a silly Nintendo rep borked his words and literally implied without ambiguity that he was a newcomer. That demanded clarification due to the Nintendo rep not choosing his words carefully.
There was no sign of Ridley's full body, but there was a sign of a part of it. If you are
denying that it was Ridley's body (and shadow, for that matter), then you are
ALSO denying that Ridley was actually implied to be a boss at all. Therefore, the boss implication cannot possibly have any relation to Ridley, because it wasn't him.
Also, let's look at the line "it was obvious that he was not going to be playable after the trailer". Actually, it wasn't. Oh, you might think it was (I certainly thought it was), but there were plenty of people, including a couple gaming news sites, that drew the opposite conclusion.
But, let's take that at face value. "Chrom didn't
need a disconfirmation". Then why did he get one? Why did Nintendo
BOTHER to make an official statement that he was unplayable after that trailer, if the trailer itself showed his non-playable status perfectly well?
This is subjective, because while it doesn't make sense to you, it certainly makes perfect sense to me, enough to not be convinced of Ridley's chances at all. You hyped something up to be more than it actually is. There's no shame in that, but just don't start whining about Nintendo being deceiving and making bad marketing choices when you don't get your way, because from my perspective they've done nothing to forcefully create hype for him being playable. Only this thread has.
You utterly miss the point. Nintendo's intentions in that tease are utterly irrelevant. They might have intended to show him as a stage boss in as plain and simple terms as they could. The lack of displaying it could have been due to unfinished assets, or a recent change to the design or boss moves, or anything else. Absolutely.
There is, however, no reason to not state his is unplayable if that were the case.
After the initial tease, Nintendo received hundreds of emails asking "Does that mean Ridley isn't playable?". Nintendo has witnessed, first hand, that plenty of people now believe Ridley has a chance at being playable
BECAUSE OF THEIR ACTIONS. How they
INTERPRETED those actions is irrelevant. Again, look at Chrom and Prince Sablé. Both of those characters were presented in a very straightforward way. There was no reasonable way that people could have concluded that they were playable from how they were shown. However, a handful of people
interpreted those reveals to mean that they were playable. And, because of this, Nintendo specifically came out and clarified the situation.
Because the fact that Nintendo
INTENDED to show them as unplayable from the beginning is irrelevant. In any marketing situation, it isn't what you "intend" to do that matters, it's how the customers interpret that intention.
Good example: In the Mac vs PC commercials, Apple found that people were feeling sorry for the PC guy for always being mocked and picked on by the Apple guy. Their "intention" of simply highlighting superior features in the machine had backfired because the commercials were "interpreted" differently. As a result, they went and they changed their commercials, so that the PC guy began acting petty and hostile, in an attempt to remove that sympathy that people felt for him.
There is nothing wrong, at all, with creating a marketing image that your customers interpret in a way you don't intend. But you have to take steps to correct that image, or it
is your fault. When a substantial customer base (and I can 100% guarantee you that more people were convinced that Ridley was playable from the tease than were convinced Prince Sablé was playable from his reveal) interprets your marketing to showcase a particular feature, it is up to your marketing to correct that issue, or risk the ire (and thus, losing the business) of those customers.
Nintendo has had plenty of time to correct the misinterpretation. They have had over a year in which to say "sorry, he's not playable". They haven't done so. If Ridley were unplayable, this would be a huge, huge marketing blunder. You do
not want upset customers right when your product is being launched.
Are you trying to say that he will be in because it will boost game sales?...because you actually have no proof that Ridley being a playable character would all of the sudden coax current non-Smash bros. Players who weren't getting it anyway to buy Smash, especially with Ridley being obscure outside of the Nintendo verse.
Not exactly. I'm saying that people who were previously planning on buying the game will refuse to do so if Ridley turns out to be unplayable. That is a fact. It won't be a
lot of sales, by any means. Certainly less than a percent. But it is going to happen.
Again, I don't feel "tested". You are only testing yourself. In fact this whole paragraph is just emotional speculation. Like a child crying about not getting a toy they want.
I never used the word "tested", so I'm not sure who you're quoting there.
"I will feel mocked and betrayed if you don't put Ridley in!"
Even though he made no promises to put him in and is under no rule of law to do so.
"I won't buy the game and I will boycott Nintendo!"
I mean, really? To essentially assert that the game sales overall will be affected by your personal choice to be stubborn over one single character seems pretty self-centered. Sales will be unaffected. I'm sure there will be a few out there, extremist & irrational outspoken people who will speak with their wallet in a way that simply amounts to complaining, but it's not going to "hurt" game sales if Ridley is not playable.
Again, you fail to understand my point. For one thing, I never specified that
I was going to boycott or not purchase the game. Just that some people would.
No corporation wants unhappy customers or unhappy potential customers. The entire job of the marketing department is to make people want to buy your product.
If your marketing has created an expectation in your customers, whether intentional or not, you
HAVE to address that expectation, or your customers will be unhappy. You do not want unhappy customers. You especially do not want unhappy customers the week before your product launches.
Let's look at the game. It's retailing for $40. Let's say that it is going to sell one million copies, all digital (even numbers, and all profit goes to Nintendo, simplifying everything). Now let's say that 0.1% of the people don't purchase the game, because they felt that Nintendo was laughing at them and teasing them with the entire Ridley situation.
Congratulations, you just lost the company $40,000 because you weren't willing to make a twitter statement that Ridley wasn't playable a year earlier. Two sentences. "Ridley is a boss. Therefore, he is not playable." Less than fifteen seconds of work. Just cost the company $40,000 because you didn't do it. I hope you didn't like your job that much.
It may be a drop in the bucket to Nintendo, but that is a very real cost. Heck, even if they wait until a price drop, it's a significant cost. What's more, there's an even greater part of the customer base who will purchase the product, but have a bad taste in their mouth from the way they feel they were handled by the marketing team (and marketing is
ALL about feelings). These people may buy the game, but they will be less likely to buy future games that they were more on the fence about. Especially since they will now feel that they can't trust Nintendo's advertising. These people are
certainly less likely to start buying that lovely DLC that Nintendo is starting to sell.
In fact, Nintendo has had several employees taking extra time to
maintain the tease, by directly answering questions about him in an ambiguous fashion (not to mention the Pyrosphere Pic of the Day).
If Ridley is unplayable, there
are customers who are going to take this that negatively. Count on it. A good sociologist (or a good marketing expert) would gladly tell you approximately what percentage of fans will interpret things each way, but let's face it, I'm way too lazy for that. But it is going to happen. There are going to be unhappy potential customers, they are going to refuse to buy the game, and they are going to vocalize that unwillingness to Nintendo.
At that time, Nintendo is going to look down the line, ask "why the hell are these people refusing to buy our product because they say our marketing team was teasing them?", and then start canning people. The job of the marketing department is to prevent exactly that sort of situation from happening. It is their job to manipulate people's feelings. If a part of the consumer base walks away because they didn't do that well, they failed at their job.
Something I notice is you sure make a lot of assumptions on how Nintendo works in very absolutist ways. Do you work there?
Nintendo is a corporation. It's job is to make money. Everything it does can be brought around and explained with that objective in mind.
The only time upsetting customers (and potentially losing sales) is acceptable is when there is a greater profit to be made by doing so. Please explain what potential profit there is to be made in not making an official statement on Ridley, that would be worth alienating even a minute fraction of your customers.
Example: The XBONE E-3 presentation. Microsoft made a number of horrible and blatantly anti consumer decisions that they
knew would upset a lot of their customers. They did this, however, because they felt that eliminating the used game market would secure them more customers, more sales, and greater longevity with the product, and they believed that not enough upset customers would actually cease to be customers because of their new policies.
This decision horrible backfired on them, but the point still stands: It was a (badly) calculated decision to upset some customers to gain something of greater worth.
There is nothing to be gained by this. There is literally no logical reason to have
not mentioned Ridley over the course of the last year when they
KNOW there are people who still think he is playable (they literally get tweets and emails about it every day, check the twitter of any Nintendo bigwig). If Ridley becomes unplayable at launch, all of those fans will be upset, and the company will have gained nothing for it.
I don't see Sakurai as the sole decision maker behind everything Smash but I certainly don't assume to know how and why certain things happen.
That's obvious.
It can simply be assumed that much of the direction behind the marketing of Smash is based on Sakurai because he is the director of development. That's a pretty important position by the way.
Yes. It means he's responsible for developing the product. Not marketing it.
He certainly isn't getting all his info dumps cleared by Nintendo of America, don't seriously try to convince me that any other Nintendo aside from Japan has a say.
NoA is at least aware of the desires and intentions of the American fans, and will at least bring that to the attention of the main company (if not make a flat out statement of playability on their own, given that the "reveal" was already made). And Nintendo has nothing to be gained by prolonging the Ridley revelation.
Here's the simplification part *facepalm
Oh, it's only starting now?
First of all, it's possible to get your hopes up and dreams crushed by merely anything, it depends on your desires and proneness to be misled or get hyped up.
Absolutely true. Congratulations.
Sakurai can't possibly manage to work around everyone's specific measures behind what they consider teasing and false hype-building. Nobody could. Everyone wants something different.
Also true. Completely irrelevant, but true. Two in a row. Good job.
I'm simply pointing out that not all patterns in life are meaningful or telling of something. I can give you many examples of meaningless patterns if you like. The point is you find and seek out these patterns yourself in an effort to use them as "proof" to console yourself or make yourself feel better about a likely possibility (that he won't be playable).
You're still missing the entire point of everything I've been talking about.
THE PURPOSE OF MARKETING IS TO MAKE PEOPLE FEEL GOOD ABOUT YOUR PRODUCT.
It's all, 100% about how people "feel" about your product. It's not about what you present, not about what you show, it's about the resulting influence on the customers.
IF THE CUSTOMER IS UNHAPPY, THEN YOU ARE NOT DOING A GOOD JOB OF MARKETING.
It doesn't matter what you intend, it doesn't matter how clear you want to be, how straightforward you think your position is. If customers walk away unhappy, if potential customers are driven away, or made less likely to buy your products in the future,
YOU HAVE FAILED AT YOUR JOB.
My logic is not that Ridley is an exception, it's that you're forcibly pointing at a pattern that is otherwise insignificant and has no bearing on his playability chances. You think certain things are a big deal that I do not (sounds like being Human).
So you're arguing that Nintendo is doing absolutely nothing to watch the marketing or customer reactions to the reveals and information that is being presented. That they don't have any marketing experts, that they aren't doing anything to ensure that their invested advertising is not going to hurt game sales at all. That every explicit disconfirm that has happened thus far has been a result of a completely random act of divine intervention, rather than any attempt by Nintendo to ensure that customers remain as positive about the product as possible.
Why would you believe anything posted, then? Everything is random, there are no patterns. We certainly can't trust a Pic of the Day. It could be completely random. There may be a "pattern" to only having actual, confirmed game content show up on there, but that's just grasping at straws.
I do like the idea of running Twitter that way though. We'll get an RNG to determine
when to post, then a random sentence generator to determine
what to post. I might try that one day.
At the end of the day, it is merely the fact we are human that is why we will always evaluate the situation differently, and we will find out in very little due time who's perspective was closest to reality.
Yes, we will.
If I unlock Ridley in real-time on my stream, you can be there to say "I told you so" and I won't even be mad.
I normally don't like being that petty once I win (before I'm proven right, completely different story). I'm also probably too lazy to find your stream. So you're safe from that, at least.
!
, I couldn't imagine IsmaR having the money laying around to buy a few hundred thousand copies of the game~
