All third-party inclusions benefit Nintendo more than the third-party. The third-party is paid for licensing, obviously, and gets their IP shown off on someone else's dime, but at the end of the day the game is pushing Nintendo software and hardware. The majority of the profit is for Nintendo alone. Difference is most if not all of the companies Nintendo has collaborated with for smash have been smaller than Nintendo themselves. They can afford the advertisement smash gives them, because it’s the bigger company approaching the smaller company if you get me And it's not like in Kingdom Hearts where there's some of Square Enix's content, but it's otherwise mostly Disney's content being used. Im not really sure what you’re trying to say here, sorrry It's just a little bit of Metal Gear/Castlevania/Sonic/Final Fantasy content being sprinkled into what's largely a Nintendo affair. It's not like third parties are getting equal billing to Mario or Zelda. Third parties are still promoted through advertisements and commercial, which is still a benefit to them as the smaller company. While first-parties do get more promotion, ultimately when you’re a smaller company smash is just a benefit. When you’re a larger one, less so.
The reason to accept is that Super Smash is now a prestigious series that companies are enthusiastic about lending their IP's to, regardless of the business benefit. Even Konami, who's been burning all kinds of bridges over the past few years, held nothing back (except the Kojima fox logo). Konami’s bridge burning means they need all the good-will they can get, plus they have significantly collaborated with Nintendo in terms of smash before. Again I feel this comes down to being smaller companies compared to Nintendo, unlike Disney The only company that's been reserved is Square Enix, and even then they were the ones who let Sakurai pick Cloud, rather than make demands for promotional content like, say, Noctis. I mean, cloud is still arguably the mascot of Square-Enix, it’s still great promotion. And plus, as you said they’ve been conservative in other areas, and Sakurai himself said they had to go to great lengths for the third parties this game, so it’s clear some third parties are being difficult. And keep in mind this is for a relatively smaller company, just imagine what a giant like Disney would be like to work with.
You just completely ignored how I linked to the fact that Nintendo and Disney are collaborating on a TV show for Disney primarily meant to advertise the Nintendo Switch. Disney didn't have a reason to accept that deal, either, when they could run programming that drives impressions and sales of their own properties.
Bowser was also in Wreck-it-Ralph. Disney is working with Illumination on the Mario movie, but that doesn't mean anything regarding Disney's relationship with Nintendo. Kingdom Hearts is exclusive to PlayStation, but that doesn't seem to stop Nintendo and Disney from doing things together.
Disney also broadcast the Smash Wii U EVO tournament for a year or two, which not only serves to just promote Nintendo, but shows that Disney is aware of how big the Super Smash series is. Now imagine how excited they'd be at the prospect of Sora showing up onstage at EVO.
Sorry, I missed you linking that. Anyways yeah I agree here, I was just misinformed about that.
It's not even a matter of law. It's a matter of how much these companies are willing to cooperate. And all the third-parties already involved or speculated to be involved (like Disney and Microsoft) have shown that they are very willing to cooperate in various business ventures. Have we seen any company snub their nose at an invitation to Smash (besides Sega with Sonic during Brawl's development, and then they later changed their mind)? I mean you just said yourself, third parties have turned down smash before. Sure sega eventually came around, but that proves there’s a history of this stuff (uldnt doubt there’s been a number of third-party negotiations in the ast that have ultimately failed behind the scenes). Again, I do feel that the fact that companies like Square have been a bit difficult, and that Disney is such a giant company to the point where they need to have some serious investment in a licensing deal to accept it would point towards Disney being fickle. Keep in mind to get sora Sakurai would have to go through Square AND Disney. Have we seen any company be needlessly difficult regarding any character or content in Smash? Or has every company involved so far been very cooperative with Nintendo/Sakurai and what he wants to do? I mean some companies are pretty clearly being a bit uncooperative, Sakurai said so himself.
Of course, it's always possible that Disney might be a stick in the mud and make the unprecedented decision to say no. There's no certainty in any of this. But the evidence suggests that there's no reason to believe that'll happen. Oh and the World of final fantasy situation shows that even when working with square Enid, a company they already had strong relations with, licensing still limited sora’s availability greatly
