Alright SmashChu, here it is. Sorry it's late. I chose making a roster of us over responding more quickly. I have no regrets.
I could accuse this of you as well. Your biggest paragraphs were responses to parts of my reply that weren’t even about the main topic. Important parts of what I wrote didn’t get replied to, or were brushed off. You tell me how wrong I am instead of presenting your own point and “correcting” mine.
In video games that rely mostly on its characters to sell, that’s true. Smash has been one of these series. Sure, now maybe could get by (with significantly reduced sales… significantly) without existing characters. Maybe. But, commercially, it most likely couldn’t when it was starting out, it was a largely unproven gameplay idea in a genre that, even with already established characters, still only did mediocrely at the time. Sakurai recognized this.
Many series rely on something apart from gameplay (not that it doesn’t play a part) to sell well, and if not character recognition, then brand name recognition. Series like CoD are not character-focused, series like Final Fantasy have rotating casts, but as long as they have a recurring and well-known brand title, they’ve already got a built-in audience, and they're already going to sell units based solely on that, regardless of gameplay.
The same reason I brought up with Marvel. Mickey’s main medium isn’t video games. That’s not where his audience is. A portion is there, because audiences can overlap, and that’s the majority cause of what sales he does have, that recognition and familiarity his audience has for him, but expecting Mickey to sell as well as Mario through Mario’s audience (gamers) is like expecting people to go to Disney Land to see Mario.
Just because someone is more famous in general doesn’t mean they can do as well or better than less-famous people/characters in every source of media. They don’t share the same audience everywhere. It'd be like expecting a professional athlete to be able to compete professionally in every sport.
But, like I said, Mickey’s presence in the games he is in is the cause of the majority of the sales of that game. People like and/or know Mickey, so they buy his game. It’s got a built-in audience already. Not all the sales come from previous fans of Mickey (or whoever the character might be), some are just interested in the gameplay, but those are mostly hardcore gamers (though some hardcore gamers could also buy it mostly for Mickey), and more importantly, the minority.
Doing some checking will show that after Sonic 1 and 2, Sonic’s sales numbers declined to where they currently sit, roughly between 1-2.5 mil a game. They’ve been this way for almost 20 years. They were this way on the same system as the first two. They were this way before the gameplay even changed. The first two were more of a popularity spike than a consistency. Since Sonic 3, this has been Sonic’s audience capacity. On Sega systems, the BEST place to sell Sonic games, as all his fans would presumably own one, post-Sonic 2 he only managed sales comparable to what he does now. Sonic’s numbers haven’t greatly wavered since like 93, it should show that since then, the same number of people are buying Sonic games as they always did, regardless of “quality of gameplay” (because we all know that’s been up and down). So what is left to sell the game besides the quality of gameplay? The character. Sonic has only managed to sell as many as he did due to the name he made for himself very early on. Take Sonic and all his friends out of a game, keep the current gameplay, and it wouldn’t sell as well. Of course I don’t have proof, because NO GAME COMPANY WOULD EVER DO THIS, but removing the marketable character in a game, while it would not the only thing that would affect sales, would be the thing that affects the majority in a series that only gets its success by brand recognition at this point.
As to why Mario went from 40 mil to 6? I’m pretty sure Sunshine didn’t come packaged with every Gamecube, that’s why. If it had, it would’ve sold 21 mil, more than any NES Mario game not packaged with a system. That’s like wondering why Wii Sports sold more than Wii Party. Another reason is because back in the days of SMB, Nintendo was basically the only console with major popularity, and SMB was the most popular NES game. There was little to no competition for the most part, and the market wasn’t split to any great extent. If there was only one major console around during the 6th gen, and Sunshine came packaged with it, it would pull some pretty big numbers as well.
Post-NES, when the competition showed up though in the next gen, the market changed, people split up to a different console, and accommodations and sacrifices were made. Since then Mario games have pretty much sold with fluctuations, but fairly consistently. The only reason some Mario games (like NSMB and MK) have picked up now is due to the casual market Nintendo recently accrued. I never said that gameplay and accessibility played no factor in success, because since NSMB and MK are both so accessible and feature Mario, it’s really a more equal mix of the two factors than, for example, another Mario spin-off, which usually relies more on Mario to sell it than the gameplay. However I stand by my point, without Mario, none of those games, except the original SMB (which was packaged with the system) would have sold nearly as well.
First off, did I say including marketable characters will cause the game to become the bestselling one in that genre? I did not. I did say it will help sell the game, which it does. There might be a few golf titles above Mario, but look at all the ones below him. Speaking of Golf games though, why do you think EA uses Tiger Woods in the title and on the cover of almost all their golf games instead of a generic golfer? Is it because they likely paying him extra royalties? No, it’s because they know marketing him with the game will cause more people to pick it up. He appeals to the main audience of those games, golfers overlapped with gamers.
As for “Golf”? Well, one, that game has a Mario-looking guy on the cover, who in the west is Mario. That attracts consumers. But more importantly, it sold so well because at the time it was THE ONLY golf game on a system with little to no competition. Without the market being split between golf games or systems, why do you think it sold so well?
I also didn’t say every Mario game will sell the same, don’t put words in my mouth. I said games will sell better with Mario marketed with them. Gameplay does play a factor, I never said it didn't, it’s just not the biggest factor in most genres. In a game with the same characters (Mario Golf, Mario Kart) that is when gameplay makes the difference, but before that step, the characters usually come first.
Marketing isn’t the sole reason products sell, but it’s sure the biggest reason. Without marketing, most people wouldn’t know some unnecessary consumer product such as Smash even exists. When they did go to the store to buy it, it would be some blank cover with text, because including recognizable characters on the cover is marketing. And then, how would they even know if that was the game to buy? Devoid of marketing, all games would be blank covers with titles. It’d basically be like walking into a store blind, you have no knowledge of what’s in front of you, and everything looks the same. They wouldn’t be able to see pre-release promotional material, because that’s advertising, and that’s marketing. It’d fall to fans to market such products, and fan campaigns rarely have the success as official marketing.
You think gameplay is going to sell itself without promotion and marketing of such “unique”, “quality”, and “accessible” features? Innovation still needs promotion. Casuals still need marketing material such as commercials and in-store promotion before word can spread, the more hardcore need evidence of quality and pre-release hype, which marketing tries to convey. The Blue Ocean Strategy takes marketing for granted and assumes as long as you innovate, you will find success, which is flawed. One of the only success stories of companies that implemented the Blue Ocean Strategy is Nintendo, with the DS, Wii, 3DS, and to a lesser extent, the Wii U. The DS and Wii were, granted, very innovative, and Nintendo seized the opportunity to venture into uncontested market space, like the strategy dictates, with much of their software, and for those two, were very successful. However, the amount of marketing Nintendo did for those systems and the games such as Brain Age, Nintendogs, and the Wii series that fall into the “new market” was ridiculous. They basically created a new demographic, and that takes an unimaginable amount of marketing. It paid off sure, but it wouldn’t have without all the marketing they did. Imagine if they had released those products but did nothing to promote them among the casual. The Blue Ocean Strategy still requires marketing, innovation doesn’t necessarily sell itself. Nintendo once again tried to push the innovative with the 3D element of the 3DS, but even with all their promotion, it turns out the consumer doesn’t care too much about the 3D, thus Nintendo rarely brings it up anymore. Just because something is innovative, just because there’s nothing else quite like it on the market, doesn’t mean it will necessarily find success. Smash easily could’ve faltered commercially without strong brands. Again, I’m not saying Smash’s commercial success isn’t in part due to the gameplay and the high quality, I’m just saying that’s not the cause or largest factor of its success.
Lastly, bad products still can sell, if they have decent brand recognition gained through marketing. Look at Wii Music, the Wii brand name managed to carry past 2 million sales, because it certainly wasn’t the gameplay. Another example is Pokémon Battle Revolution, a very mediocre game, over 1 mil in sales. The Just Dance series only ever gets average reviews, but sells 5-6 million copies each. Sonic 06 sold about as much as average Sonic games, Resident Evil 6 has nearly 5 million sales but very mixed to negative reviews, and quite a few licensed games sell much better than their gameplay deserves.
By proving that games still sell as well as they have before (aka not declining) is where my argument falls apart?
Because you said these games have sold less over time and I showed how they didn’t. Would it have been more relevant had I not proved you wrong?
It's not relevant to the overall topic, but you were the one to bring up Nintendo's supposed "decline".
I’m saying your point is wrong because to be in a decline, you need declining sales. The only time Nintendo sales have noticeably declined is when they stopped becoming the sole major system on the market (the Master System didn’t sell well anywhere except Europe), which happed, oh, in the fourth gen of gaming, like 20+ years ago. Since then they’ve fluctuated. By the virtue of the fact that sales have overall increased from last gen makes any statements about continual decline null. You can’t have increasing sales and profits yet be in a commercial decline.
I was responding to that single point of yours, not the whole argument. Therefore, I split it up.
Splitting up a paragraph helps me address things individually. If you can’t follow how it’s related, that’s on you, no one else who read my post complained or seemed to get confused.
That's a good cop out. You're implying the opposite, yet can't prove it either. This is honestly one of the flimsiest excuses I’ve heard on here. The absence of proof is not the admission of being incorrect. If it really wouldn’t make a difference, why bother licensing characters for continual use in these games when, according to you, they can profit just the same with an original, and cheaper to use, cast? For that matter, why would any company pay to use a character that would be used in marketing, but overall wouldn’t really affect the game if they were absent, if they were to profit all the same without using them? It’s because the profits increase with well-known characters that have existing audiences that would carry over.
Game companies shove characters into games not originally planned for them a lot. Why do you think Kirby was added to Epic Yarn, Mega Man was made the protagonist of Mega Man X instead of Zero like Inafune planned, Diddy Kong was added to Diddy Kong Racing, Panel de Pon was reworked with Yoshi and the Tetris name for western audiences, or the original characters of Dragon King were replaced? There are even more examples that I’m forgetting, am unaware of, or the public wasn’t even told of. The game companies aren’t out to tell you how they made changes due to sales, it makes them look bad, but that’s why. They know existing characters (even new versions of them) are more likely to sell better than new characters with an unproven brand.
I didn’t realize I had to spell everything out for you, I assumed you would be capable of thinking of at least one other accessible game or game series other than Smash. Most 2D platformers, some 3D platformers, many racing games, many music games, some puzzle games, and really most series aimed at the young children or casual demographic are fairly accessible. Sure most games have intricacies, more advanced parts to them, but like Smash, my examples can also be picked up and played fairly easily. They’re accessible to most audiences, even if you don’t do well at them.
However, Smash sells better than most accessible series, other than Mario, Wii, and probably two or three others. Plus way to ignore the rest of that paragraph.
I gave evidence on how Nintendo’s sales weren’t declining, I gave evidence how the Blue Ocean Strategy doesn’t always work, I gave evidence how bad games can still sell well, I gave evidence how games are reworked to sell better by adding more marketable characters, the main topic of what we’re debating is a hypothetical, you can’t prove Smash’s path had it gone differently either.
There are plenty of examples of new IPs that never become successful and don’t get follow-ups, even if they have great gameplay and are critically acclaimed. Even if they are accessible. That’s basically what most likely would happen if you took away the profitable characters/brands from an existing IP. Of course not all new IPs are doomed to fail, otherwise we’d never get a new IP, but VERY FEW of them can match the success of existing IPs on their first or second outing. That’s why if companies have an already successful existing IP, it’d be stupid to totally rebrand it, unless it’s declining harshly in sales.
*What the whole debate boils down to, before we started getting a little off-topic, is that the addition of the existing well-known and marketable characters contributed to Smash's commercial success more than gameplay, accessibility, or innovation did (which I don't deny did play a part). With original characters, Dragon King would've been significantly less commercially successful than Smash.*
If you don’t at least attribute part of it to the marketability of the characters included, it’s going to be wrong.
I didn't mean I thought Nintendo was doomed, I meant opposing fanboys and alarmists will declare it "doomed". Nintendo could still make several systems that sold worse than the Gamecube in a row before they are doomed. They're loaded, and they've got some of the most valuable IPs in gaming. They'll be just fine. Eventually.
Like I said before though, I wouldn't really be too sad if Iwata left.
That’s fine. I think I used your original reply to structure mine though. Don’t worry I’m not mad or anything, (things in caps are due to reading too many of Oasis’s posts at once, not due to anger
) it’s not like I’m debating Micaiah’s chances with some immovable wall.
Again, sorry it took so long to reply. Embarrass
I don’t really want to debate the market and business anymore, some of my points strayed too far from the original point I was trying to make, so like most of our debates, I’m content to leave it at agree to disagree.