Okay, hold the phone. Star Allies is a year younger than ARMS; Tropical Freeze IIRC sold more than ARMS overall. Yet ARMS was the series that got priority.
And even when talking about vocal audiences, I'd argue Bandana Dee and Dixie had just as much of a DLC following as an ARMS character did. There are arguments pointing to these characters not having what it takes, but timing and audiences are not two of them.
Well according to
SKX31
, Nintendo does seem to have some sort of current plan with ARMS, and while I don't think Min Min really works as a promotional pick due to the age of the game, there might be something we don't currently know about coming down the line.
I'm not fully certain if Nintendo has a Splatoon 3 or ARMS 2 planned... but I'd argue that, ¥€$. Nintendo has some interest in the Twitch pie:
Official tournaments and support after the final patch / update is one way to keep a competitive game's playerbase playing, I mean, TPC still holds Pokken tournaments, and there's no guarantee if we'll see a Pokken 2 or something like that.
Splatoon 2's Twitch numbers are overall rather small, but peak during Nintendo's official tournaments to 5 digit territory. ARMS has
had really low Twitch numbers - but the April 2020 Online Open had 880 players and the August 2020 Open 767 players.
And I wanna highlight the
April 2020 Online Open in particular:
While it was never officially confirmed, the tournament was likely held to tie-in with the announcement that an ARMS Character would be coming to
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in June along with ARMS being free to play for 10 days via Nintendo Switch Online.
Those numbers signal that there's an active Splatoon and ARMS playerbase respectively. At the very least Nintendo want to keep as many people as possible invested in these two games. Regardless of whether there's an ARMS 2 or Splatoon 3 in the works or not. After all, companies like Riot and Valve have kept their games' fanbases largely intact via official tournaments streamed on Twitch and other stuff.