cmbsfm
Smash Champion
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2012
- Messages
- 2,823
- NNID
- srmario
First of all, I’m not saying an inclusion in Smash automatically equals more sales. It does equal exposure though, which is important. But I’m not saying it’s the only thing they need to do. It’ll just be one piece of a marketing campaign. Square and Nintendo definitely need to do more to push the game. I do remember hearing that we are getting more DQ news soon, so it’s likely DQ will be at e3 in some form.Just because they are recognizable does not mean that their games will sell. Fire Emblem is a prime example of that. Ike got pushed by Nintendo in Smash Brothers yet.. like I told earlier, the games he was in sold piss poor. Speaking about another franchise that has an "iconic character". F-zeros peak in the sale was the GameCube title back in the day. Then they did two GBA titles with the last title released in 2004. Both of these titles sales numbers nosedived into oblivion and are the reasons there has not been an F-zero game in 15 years. Released in the golden era of Melee and to some degree Captain Falcon considering how popular he is to play in that specific game....
Making an assumption that people would just randomly check out a game because they "like it" is a rather naive sentiment. To go back to Fire Emblem. I was at an emulator site one day because I wanted to play Pokemon Crystal that I had borrowed out for a friend that was on a trip. Out of sheer luck, I saw "if you like this you might like that" and Fire Emblem was one of them. I downloaded it, played it and then did my best to track down a copy. That took months I might add.
This is the only known add that they did for Fire Emblem 7 (the first released FE game in the west) is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM-s5C0dnZs&ab_channel=XenoGear and they did not even push it in every country (nor is it any good I might add)
Later comes Path of Radiance which is the first installment of the story with Ike. Not a single add outside some picture in Nintendo Club Magazine. I was lucky to find it at a Game store at that time.
Shadow Dragon? There was no copy I could find for years because I missed the release date due to lack of information. I had to buy it on eBay to get a hold of it. Then they made New Mystery of Emblem and that became a Japanese exclusive because of how poor Shadow Dragon sold. Heck, I did not even know about Awakening because of a trailer that came out of nowhere. No introduction in a direct or something like that.
What I´m trying to say is.. if you want to push the games, you can´t rely on one thing only (in this cause Smash Brothers) to make the series bigger. Truth be told, I would argue that it would have been better to show off the DQ games at E3 no matter if the Square Enix character is Erdick or not. Then people know what type of game Dragon Quest is and you would have got the most eyes on it. To expect people to just randomly check out the game because Smash Bros is a naive business strategy no matter who and what franchise you're talking about. Pushing only the characters into peoples faces can annoy people more than anything which I have heard quite a lot for people about the Joker add.
Like I said earlier, nowadays newcomers receive a much more grand treatment and are pushed more to the public. If you look at Fire Emblem representation in Melee, it’s rather barebones. It improved in Brawl though. And It’s interesting to note that post-brawl’s release the next mainline entry was Awakening.
It is not naive to assume that a smash bros inclusion would lead to more exposure of the franchise. It is however, naive to act like that is the only thing they’d do. That’s not even what I was trying to argue. If the character/franchise has no/little exposure, how the hell would you expect a game to sell? It’s just a step in the right direction