Official Newcomer/DLC Speculation Discussion

[Verde Coeden Scalesworth]

They absolutely could have, but why 16 exact? Why not 20? 25? 50?

...Cause there's 16 total characters in the game and it could be any of them? That's a pretty simple reasoning.

I honestly believe we could get 5 total playable, with references at best. So Spring Man/Ribbon Girl/Ninjara/Min Min as the core costumes, with Springtron as the obvious Spring Man secondary costume. Then the rest could be references otherwise. Like a Dr. Coyle colorings for Min Min or Ribbon Girl.

The rest are very easy to make spirits, including the ones not already spirits. It's still 16 spirits(5 alt ones respectively, if they give Spring Man/etc. a new one), sure. There's a fair amount of work done to make 11 more battles, but you could also combine some of them together as is.

Note that I don't remember all the spirits from them. I remember Spring Man and Min Min, but that's it so far. I remember there's 6, though.

 

[Shroob]

...Cause there's 16 total characters in the game and it could be any of them? That's a pretty simple reasoning.

I honestly believe we could get 5 total playable, with references at best. So Spring Man/Ribbon Girl/Ninjara/Min Min as the core costumes, with Springtron as the obvious Spring Man secondary costume. Then the rest could be references otherwise. Like a Dr. Coyle colorings for Min Min or Ribbon Girl.

The rest are very easy to make spirits, including the ones not already spirits. It's still 16 spirits(5 alt ones respectively, if they give Spring Man/etc. a new one), sure. There's a fair amount of work done to make 11 more battles, but you could also combine some of them together as is.

Note that I don't remember all the spirits from them. I remember Spring Man and Min Min, but that's it so far. I remember there's 6, though.

.......No.

That's... not what I meant at all.


16 empty spots in World of Light, you know, from the Plant datamine...?

 

[SMAASH! Puppy]

Define blow up? People have been able to fit over a hundred characters on the CSS afaik via hacking, the thing is built to morph into whatever shape is necessary.

Sorry, my teacher says blow up instead of crash and I guess I've adopted the term. lol

I remember someone saying that if you add any more World of Light slots, the game will crash. Also, I'm not sure that the character select screen and World of Light slots are related.

 

[Verde Coeden Scalesworth]

.......No.

That's... not what I meant at all.


16 empty spots in World of Light, you know, from the Plant datamine...?

I think they're placeholders at best. We effectively have 12 spots filled. They don't need to all be filled.

...Did I remember the amount of ARMS' characters wrong, though? I don't own the game(played a bit of the demo. Couldn't feel the gameplay much. Still a great game on its own, though).

 

[Shroob]

I think they're placeholders at best. We effectively have 12 spots filled. They don't need to all be filled.

...Did I remember the amount of ARMS' characters wrong, though? I don't own the game(played a bit of the demo. Couldn't feel the gameplay much. Still a great game on its own, though).

Sure, they could be placeholders, no denying that.

But Smash 4 filled all its placeholder spots to the point they had to add an additional spot midway into dlc.


This time, they added them all at the start.

 

[SMAASH! Puppy]

I think they're placeholders at best. We effectively have 12 spots filled. They don't need to all be filled.

...Did I remember the amount of ARMS' characters wrong, though? I don't own the game(played a bit of the demo. Couldn't feel the gameplay much. Still a great game on its own, though).

There are 15 playable ARMS characters. Add Headlok and Biff, and there are 17 notable ARMS characters.

 

[Blade of Evil's Bane]

Broke: predicting Spring Man or Min Min.
Woke: predicting Spring Man with 7 other ARMS fighters as alts.
Bespoke: predicting Min Min with 7 other ARMS fighters as alts but Spring Man isn't one of them.

Transcendent: predicting Spring Man with his own alt costumes and one of them is based on Spring Man, the boss from Mega Man 7:

 

[Verde Coeden Scalesworth]

Sure, they could be placeholders, no denying that.

But Smash 4 filled all its placeholder spots to the point they had to add an additional spot midway into dlc.


This time, they added them all at the start.

I honestly don't see a reason for them to fill them all "just because".

DLC was a new period in Smash 4 too, so it makes sense they added them as it "happened".

When did we find the placeholders again? Cause I wonder how much before the Pass 2 was probably considered as well. It's hard to say if the placeholders were created before or around the same time. That might be relevant to speculation.

There are 15 playable ARMS characters. Add Headlok and Biff, and there are 17 notable ARMS characters.

Ah, thank you. Yeah, I misread the post earlier when they said 16, heh.

That said, that's only 10 DLC spirits max needed(ignoring fighter spirits, which might not matter much if it's, say, Dr. Coyle who has no Spirit).

 

[Shroob]

I honestly don't see a reason for them to fill them all "just because".

DLC was a new period in Smash 4 too, so it makes sense they added them as it "happened".

When did we find the placeholders again? Cause I wonder how much before the Pass 2 was probably considered as well. It's hard to say if the placeholders were created before or around the same time. That might be relevant to speculation.


Ah, thank you. Yeah, I misread the post earlier when they said 16, heh.

That said, that's only 10 DLC spirits max needed(ignoring fighter spirits, which might not matter much if it's, say, Dr. Coyle who has no Spirit).

They were added literally the first patch of the game, February 2018.

 

[Verde Coeden Scalesworth]

They were added literally the first patch of the game, February 2018.

Then yeah, I don't think they had a clear goal to fill them as is. Cause that means they'd have to already have planned Pass 2 super early on. However, their statement is that Pass 2 was decided upon a bit later, after Pass 1 sold rather well. There's no way to tell, and it's possible the straight-out sales made them decide to do a second pass as early as February as well, but it feels unlikely. I'm guessing maybe closer to March or April they felt a second pass is a good idea. But that's possibly too early. As long as they decided it by September 2019.

 

[Shroob]

Then yeah, I don't think they had a clear goal to fill them as is. Cause that means they'd have to already have planned Pass 2 super early on. However, their statement is that Pass 2 was decided upon a bit later, after Pass 1 sold rather well. There's no way to tell, and it's possible the straight-out sales made them decide to do a second pass as early as February as well, but it feels unlikely. I'm guessing maybe closer to March or April they felt a second pass is a good idea. But that's possibly too early. As long as they decided it by September 2019.

On the contrary, considering the pass was released the day of the game, it probably received the majority of its sales within the first 3 months, especially since it got in right before Christmas.


Sure, we have no hard numbers, but like all products, it's probably very safe to assume that there was an enormous spike of sales at the very beginning, only to taper off into more modest sales in the latter months.


If Banjo was already in talks for procuring the rights for DLC in June 2018, I don't see why it's illogical to assume that they were planning a 2nd wave of DLC shortly after the first launched if there was a massive surge of sales from the get go.

 

[SMAASH! Puppy]

Ah, thank you. Yeah, I misread the post earlier when they said 16, heh.

That said, that's only 10 DLC spirits max needed(ignoring fighter spirits, which might not matter much if it's, say, Dr. Coyle who has no Spirit).

Just to clarify:
From what I gather, World of Light slots are for adding characters to The World of Light and doesn't really have anything to do with spirits. However, I have seen reports of certain alternate costumes taking up World of Light slots. I've also heard reports that the game crashes if you add more than there already are.

To be honest, I don't really know how it all works, and it kind of sounds like all three of us need a bit more information on that front before any substantial conclusions can be made about it.

 

[Cutie Gwen]

On the contrary, considering the pass was released the day of the game, it probably received the majority of its sales within the first 3 months, especially since it got in right before Christmas.


Sure, we have no hard numbers, but like all products, it's probably very safe to assume that there was an enormous spike of sales at the very beginning, only to taper off into more modest sales in the latter months.


If Banjo was already in talks for procuring the rights for DLC in June 2018, I don't see why it's illogical to assume that they were planning a 2nd wave of DLC shortly after the first launched if there was a massive surge of sales from the get go.

Slight correction, the pass was only available back then if you bought it alongside a digital copy, they wouldn't release the pass by itself for a few months, I think it was when Joker dropped but I don't entirely remember

 

[Shroob]

Slight correction, the pass was only available back then if you bought it alongside a digital copy, they wouldn't release the pass by itself for a few months, I think it was when Joker dropped but I don't entirely remember

Fair point, but that theoretically bloated its sales, at least in theory.


As much as I enjoy physical games, I'd argue in today's day and age, more and more people buy digitally.

 

[Verde Coeden Scalesworth]

On the contrary, considering the pass was released the day of the game, it probably received the majority of its sales within the first 3 months, especially since it got in right before Christmas.


Sure, we have no hard numbers, but like all products, it's probably very safe to assume that there was an enormous spike of sales at the very beginning, only to taper off into more modest sales in the latter months.


If Banjo was already in talks for procuring the rights for DLC in June 2018, I don't see why it's illogical to assume that they were planning a 2nd wave of DLC shortly after the first launched if there was a massive surge of sales from the get go.

Actually, from what I gathered, it was March 2018 for Banjo.

However, that was also the first pass and isn't too clear. But if June is more accurate, that's not a severely long time. 4 months and all. So we're talking maybe 6-7 months, well after. We don't have a very strong timeframe to go off of either. I mean, April or May seems like a possible estimate to when it started for Pass 1. Pass 2 may or may not have taken longer, but other than being ready 1 month earlier than Pass 1's "finished being decided", it doesn't ultimately suggest this was decided upon that early. It's a close call though.

Just to clarify:
From what I gather, World of Light slots are for adding characters to The World of Light and doesn't really have anything to do with spirits. However, I have seen reports of certain alternate costumes taking up World of Light slots. I've also heard reports that the game crashes if you add more than there already are.

To be honest, I don't really know how it all works, and it kind of sounds like all three of us need a bit more information on that front before any substantial conclusions can be made about it.

The spirits was unrelated to the WoL stuff. That was more talking about how many were likely being added for the Spirit Boards, since there's not a very good reason to basically advertise the whole set.

And if it's alternate costumes, that means that they filled up a lot more. But I also only remember alternate costumes taking up the 30 unique costume slots at one point(2 for PP, 2 for Joker, 4 for Hero, 1 for Terry, and 2 for Byleth so far. That's only 11. We have 6 characters coming, so they're possibly updating that for more too). As for World of Light slots, that might see an update anyway if necessary.

I don't think the current WoL or Costume slots are final numbers either. They may not see a full use, may even get an update with more slots, or they'll fill it all out(probably not the last one, since that's more of "lol, we must use them" when that's not needed. As they can easily add placeholders when they want to, they'll fill whatever is needed).

 

[MisterHollywood]

I'm not so sure about this. One of the big things that I've consistently seen praised about Arms is the character design, and I completely agree with the praise. Arms has lots of really unique and cleverly designed characters. By telling us that the new fighter will be from Arms, Smash fans are forced to learn about the entire roster, rather than just the one character chosen as the fighter. I think it's entirely possible that Nintendo was hoping for Smash fans to appreciate Arm's fun roster of characters, which would hopefully lead them to consider buying the game.

If this was their plan, it worked on me. Making me learn about the characters caused me to want to buy the game, and I eventually did. Had I only seen one character, I highly doubt that I would've really cared about the rest of the cast, and I probably wouldn't have ended up buying the game. For example, I've never felt any urge to learn more about Fatal Fury, because the only character that I know is Terry. It was being forced to familiarize myself with the Arms roster that caused me to want the game.

This is a very fair point that I hadn’t considered not gonna cap, familiarizing ourselves with the characters is a good way to get us into the game more. At the same time, I think that would happen regardless of who gets added? Like think about all the people who picked up Persona 5 when Joker got in, and all the people who decided to try Dragon Quest 11 when Hero was added. It would have the same effect at the end of the day.

Dude I never said Spring Man wasn't unique but you're claiming that by stating that we know for a fact Sakurai never shot down a potential DLC character due to lack of ideas means I said Spring Man wouldn't be unique. Now you're saying that you grossly misinterpretting what I'm saying confusing me must mean I have no arguments when you're making mountains out of nonexistant molehills like you did last night by saying me being pessimistic about Spring Man goes against your sense of realism

im not saying that though, I’m saying this:

the arms character was chosen for promotional reasons and the fact that the arms character, no matter if it’s Springman or someone else, will be unique. And I’m saying that this goal can be accomplished by adding ANYONE from ARMS. Springman would be unique and would promote ARMS
Ribbon girl would be unique and would promote ARMS
Min Min would be unique and would promote ARMS

They all would accomplish the same function and accomplish the goal Nintendo and Sakurai want to achieve

 

[Cutie Gwen]

Fair point, but that theoretically bloated its sales, at least in theory.


As much as I enjoy physical games, I'd argue in today's day and age, more and more people buy digitally.

Oh, I agree that your theory sounds... sound, if anything that would support your theory as pass sales having a high ass attach rate to digital copies would make Nintendo go "Oh daaaaamn, and this is WITHOUT physical copy sales"

 

[DarthEnderX]

I see my color just fine, but you can turn colored posts off.

I have them turned off, yet some people's posts still show up with colored text. Wtf is that about?

 

[HansShotFirst20]

I have them turned off, yet some people's posts still show up with colored text. Wtf is that about?

You're anti-colorblind. You see color where there is none.

 

[Godzillathewonderdog]

...so why couldn't they just wait? Like, not even announce the next fighter is from ARMS at all, and then just drop the trailer when it's ready. It really doesn't make sense to be like WHO COULD IT BE? without there being something else about the announcement

Probably because they wanted people talking about ARMS again. This reveal did coincide with ARMS being made free for a limited time.

It also tides us fans over and keeps people talking about Smash as well.

Guess we're gonna forget how Mewtwo was announced, huh?

Mewtwo was a unique situation, he was revealed early because Nintendo chose to use the character as a means to incentivize people to buy both the 3DS and Wii U versions. If you recall getting both versions got you free early access to Mewtwo. The extra potential sales was more important to Nintendo than waiting to reveal Mewtwo with a trailer.

bruh I use "guy" terms for everyone I talk to ever. Yes, I know you're a girl, and more importantly, you know you're a girl. If I call you a guy or say something like "my guy" it doesn't change the fact that that you're a girl lmao just chill

Spoiler

 

[Evil Trapezium]

Broke: predicting Spring Man or Min Min.
Woke: predicting Spring Man with 7 other ARMS fighters as alts.
Bespoke: predicting Min Min with 7 other ARMS fighters as alts but Spring Man isn't one of them.

Transcendent: predicting Spring Man with his own alt costumes and one of them is based on Spring Man, the boss from Mega Man 7:

Stroke: Predicting that all of the ARMS characters will be playable just to say that everyone is here!

 

[Glaciacott]

Missed a lot of discussion. Fundamentally I agree that Spring Man is the most likely, but we shouldn't dismiss other possibilities yet.

"Mascots and Protagonists get into Smash"
I doubt there's any such rule when deciding a Smash character. The characters that are getting in do so because they're notable and someone at some point agreed they would be fun and could be in the game.
We know how decisions happened with other characters, but we don't have enough information on how the arms decision took place. It's possible someone at Nintendo requested an Arms character, and it's also possible that they specifically pointed at Spring Man or someone else. But we don't really know, and in that context the circumstances around the reveal and the development time of the character begin to matter more. Circumstances like "what would the Arms producers ask from Sakurai?", which leads me to the next thing

"Popularity is not as important as being the protagonist"
My main counter to this is that while Min Min has popularity going for her, the results of the party crash bash are not exclusively that they prove she's the most popular.
To me the most significant thing about the crash bash is 1) we have reason to believe devs could follow the splatoon model of shaping future content based on the results of their final event, and 2) this event took place in very very close proximity to the timeline around where the character would have been chosen (mid-2019).
If would be not unlikely that in an attempt to decide which character would represent Arms best the Arms producers would lean heavily on the results of this final pcb, nor would it be unlikely that in seeing these results publishers figure that this would be the character most likely to bring attention to Arms and Arms x Smash

and a more specific argument I saw:

"Edelgard was more popular but byleth was chosen, showing popularity doesn't matter"
This is an interesting one, but I think we're talking about completely different beasts. If you play Three Houses you have a 100% of learning about Byleth and going through their story. I figure when trying to decide a character before this game was out they didn't have reason to believe Edelgard would be more popular than Dimitri/Claude, so the safest choice was Byleth with all their weapons. Remember Sakurai played this one before the game came out, he couldn't base a decision on popularity realistically.
More on this, I think polls have gone to show dimitri being the most popular, with claude close behind. Edelgard to me still would make sense because of story reasons I won't spoil, so while in a way I agree, I also think it wasn't trivial that she would be the most likable choice of the three lords.

Again, I don't disagree that Spring Man is the most likely, just because it's the simplest solution to adding Arms in smash. But this wave of "yea, Min Min being popular doesn't matter" fails to understand why she seems so possible in the first place. It also pigeon-holes Arms as something established and defined where it's far from being the case. If anything it looks like they're very intent to keep open the possibility for more lore than originally... remember that dark horse comic? The preview began with huge focus on Spring gym and the Spring Man line. But then that comic still hasn't come out. How do we know they're not revising what they want the lore to be based on what the response wound up being? How the story develops and what characters get pushed and not is still up for grabs, the franchise is young.

 

[I.D.]

Slight correction, the pass was only available back then if you bought it alongside a digital copy, they wouldn't release the pass by itself for a few months, I think it was when Joker dropped but I don't entirely remember

No, this is wrong. I have a physical copy of the game and bought the pass before Joker released.

 

[PLATINUM7]

No, this is wrong. I have a physical copy of the game and bought the pass before Joker released.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I bought the pass on launch day and I got the game physically.

 

[Shroob]

No, this is wrong. I have a physical copy of the game and bought the pass before Joker released.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I bought the pass on launch day and I got the game physically.

If true, then that just strengthens my point from earlier.

The pass had the absolute golden release window of right before Xmas, and considering how sales work, it almost assuredly had a huge spike within its first few months, only to taper off into more modest numbers later on, and I'd argue its two biggest sales spikes for the first 3 months would have been release day and Christmas.


If the sales were overwhelmingly positive that early into its life, it honest to god makes sense to set aside some spots for a 2nd wave of DLC super early.

 

[Cutie Gwen]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I bought the pass on launch day and I got the game physically.

I bought the game digitally and was unable to buy the pass after I realized I accidentally bought the one without the pass included for a while, it was outright unavailable

No, this is wrong. I have a physical copy of the game and bought the pass before Joker released.

Damn then it's a good thing I got myself that safety net

 

[XorahnGaia]

I don't think we can really compare Nintendo choosing Byleth to the current situation with the Arms character.
Byleth was chosen in 2018, at least 8 months before 3H released, the devs couldn't really pick someone on the basis of "who's the most popular character?" at that time.
With Arms it could different because now they had over 2 years to look online polls and tournaments results so popularity could definitely be a factor.

Now this all depends on when Nintendo decided to add an Arms character. Sakurai said that they thought that 1-2 bonus characters after FP1 were enough, and the WoL slots could point to seasons 2 being in the works since 2018.
But we also have Imran Khan saying that they decided to continue to support Ultimate with more DLC after the overwhelming positive reaction to Hero and Banjo in June 2019:

... so I guess we'll have to just wait and see.

 

[Opossum]

Missed a lot of discussion. Fundamentally I agree that Spring Man is the most likely, but we shouldn't dismiss other possibilities yet.

"Mascots and Protagonists get into Smash"
I doubt there's any such rule when deciding a Smash character. The characters that are getting in do so because they're notable and someone at some point agreed they would be fun and could be in the game.
We know how decisions happened with other characters, but we don't have enough information on how the arms decision took place. It's possible someone at Nintendo requested an Arms character, and it's also possible that they specifically pointed at Spring Man or someone else. But we don't really know, and in that context the circumstances around the reveal and the development time of the character begin to matter more. Circumstances like "what would the Arms producers ask from Sakurai?", which leads me to the next thing

"Popularity is not as important as being the protagonist"
My main counter to this is that while Min Min has popularity going for her, the results of the party crash bash are not exclusively that they prove she's the most popular.
To me the most significant thing about the crash bash is 1) we have reason to believe devs could follow the splatoon model of shaping future content based on the results of their final event, and 2) this event took place in very very close proximity to the timeline around where the character would have been chosen (mid-2019).
If would be not unlikely that in an attempt to decide which character would represent Arms best the Arms producers would lean heavily on the results of this final pcb, nor would it be unlikely that in seeing these results publishers figure that this would be the character most likely to bring attention to Arms and Arms x Smash

and a more specific argument I saw:

"Edelgard was more popular but byleth was chosen, showing popularity doesn't matter"
This is an interesting one, but I think we're talking about completely different beasts. If you play Three Houses you have a 100% of learning about Byleth and going through their story. I figure when trying to decide a character before this game was out they didn't have reason to believe Edelgard would be more popular than Dimitri/Claude, so the safest choice was Byleth with all their weapons. Remember Sakurai played this one before the game came out, he couldn't base a decision on popularity realistically.
More on this, I think polls have gone to show dimitri being the most popular, with claude close behind. Edelgard to me still would make sense because of story reasons I won't spoil, so while in a way I agree, I also think it wasn't trivial that she would be the most likable choice of the three lords.

Again, I don't disagree that Spring Man is the most likely, just because it's the simplest solution to adding Arms in smash. But this wave of "yea, Min Min being popular doesn't matter" fails to understand why she seems so possible in the first place. It also pigeon-holes Arms as something established and defined where it's far from being the case. If anything it looks like they're very intent to keep open the possibility for more lore than originally... remember that dark horse comic? The preview began with huge focus on Spring gym and the Spring Man line. But then that comic still hasn't come out. How do we know they're not revising what they want the lore to be based on what the response wound up being? How the story develops and what characters get pushed and not is still up for grabs, the franchise is young.

Just as a clarification, the polls in which Dimitri beat Edelgard were the Nintendo Dream polls, which notably had pretty small sample sizes with a Japan-only response base that heavily skewed female, all of which combined to give Dimitri a much bigger edge. Polls with larger sample sizes generally show the order of popularity being, in descending order, Edelgard-Dimitri-Claude. One of the best examples is Choose Your Legends 4, where the three were the top three highest voted Fire Emblem characters. Edelgard had 74,000 votes, Dimitri had 69,000, and Claude had 64,000.

But yeah, just wanted to clarify.

 

[chocolatejr9]

Any interactions you guys think could make for a good trailer?

I sorta imagined this for a Klonoa trailer, but it could really work for any Bandai Namco rep, I think. Basically, it's the same as King K. Rool's trailer, but instead of heroes and villains, it's third party companies (Sonic/Bayonetta/Joker, Snake/Simon/Richtor, etc.). Then, we cut to Pac-Man minding his own business, when he suddenly and unexpectedly runs into the new Bandai Namco rep (how exactly that happens depends on the character).

Problem is, I don't know if that would work the same way as it did for King K. Rool's trailer...

 

[Michael the Spikester]

Morning people. Anything juicy regarding the leak from yesterday?

 

[Lionfranky]

Besides Master Chief, are there other popular requested characters that never appeared on Nintendo console or who barely made it on Nintendo via skin?

Heavy and 2B come to mind. 2B is justified via her skin in Switch version game (I forgot which game). Team Fortress 2 never made it on Nintendo, did it? I haven't seen much of people dismissing Heavy with Nintendo appearance argument.

 

[Will]

Morning people. Anything juicy regarding the leak from yesterday?

What is there to obtain? They leaked source code and tech demos, that's it. It's interesting for looking at game history or for emulation, but showing it off is illegal so it's not like you could do much with it anyway. The only Smash game that could be somewhat affected by this is maybe Brawl.

 

[osby]

Morning people. Anything juicy regarding the leak from yesterday?

Yes, data miners found files pointing to Crash Bandicoot as a DLC newcomer for Super Smash Bros Brawl published by Nintendo for Wii.

Interesting development, I'm curious to see how this will affect Ultimate.

 

[SMAASH! Puppy]

I sorta imagined this for a Klonoa trailer, but it could really work for any Bandai Namco rep, I think. Basically, it's the same as King K. Rool's trailer, but instead of heroes and villains, it's third party companies (Sonic/Bayonetta/Joker, Snake/Simon/Richtor, etc.). Then, we cut to Pac-Man minding his own business, when he suddenly and unexpectedly runs into the new Bandai Namco rep (how exactly that happens depends on the character).

Problem is, I don't know if that would work the same way as it did for King K. Rool's trailer...

Alternate title: PAC-MAN becomes instant friends with Heihachi.

Funny as that would be though, it would probably work best with Klonoa since he has more ties to PAC-MAN. It also kinda works with how he's summoned to a place, does a thing, and then is banished from it.

Besides Master Chief, are there other popular requested characters that never appeared on Nintendo console or who barely made it on Nintendo via skin?

Heavy and 2B come to mind. 2B is justified via her skin in Switch version game (I forgot which game). Team Fortress 2 never made it on Nintendo, did it? I haven't seen much of people dismissing Heavy with Nintendo appearance argument.

A lack of Nintendo presence isn't really a barrier to entry if Nintendo or the devs want the character in. In the case of Team Fortress 2, it would get in because Nintendo wanted to form a partnership with Valve. In which case, I'd say that Portal and Half Life would likely get a character before Team Fortress 2 since they're much less niche.

Thinking about it, I wouldn't be surprised if we got a Valve Spirit event featuring characters from all three games, and possibly a few extras that I can't think of off the top of my head.

 

[Professor Pumpkaboo]

Dimitri had 69,000

hehe
Nice

 

[Perkilator]

Yes, data miners found files pointing to Crash Bandicoot as a DLC newcomer for Super Smash Bros Brawl published by Nintendo for Wii.

Interesting development, I'm curious to see how this will affect Ultimate.

Wait, really? The idea of the Wii supporting DLC at all intrigues me, but was Crash really planned?

 

[Cutie Gwen]

Morning people. Anything juicy regarding the leak from yesterday?

We found a codename of Stromboli, which is Rillaboom's Italian name

 

[Rie Sonomura]

Wait, really? The idea of the Wii supporting DLC at all intrigues me, but was Crash really planned?

Pretty sure he’s just pulling your leg

 

[SMAASH! Puppy]

Wait, really? The idea of the Wii supporting DLC at all intrigues me, but was Crash really planned?

Haha, now you look gullible.

We found a codename of Stromboli, which is Rillaboom's Italian name

Wait really? Why would he be named after a pasta di-AW DANGIT!



EDIT: The quote in Rie's signature gets me every time. lol

 

[osby]

Wait, really? The idea of the Wii supporting DLC at all intrigues me, but was Crash really planned?

Yep. They also found files titled yetanotherfireemblem, yourleastwantedchar, stoletheslotofyourfave and illneveraddwaluigi but it is not certain which characters they exactly refer to. It's possible that they might be placeholders for future candidates with unknown qualities.