Welcome to Fanboy Weekly: Once More With Feeling Edition. For those that haven't checked it out yet I have been writing a new weekly feature for
Game Observer. I thought I would repost the older issues so that those that haven't scoped it out yet can enjoy them and that hopefully you will all like it enough to head over to
Game Observer to check the newer and current issues of Fanboy Weekly.
Welcome back to Fanboy Weekly. This week we’ll be delving into a question that seems to pop up every other month or so and always just after E3: does Nintendo even care about its hardcore fans anymore? If you were to ask this six to seven months after the launch of the Wii I would have said likely not. Though the farther and farther we get into the lifespan of the Wii I’m more and more inclined to say that they do still care very much. The only difference is that they have picked up on something we haven’t even thought about. They’ve simply changed their marketing and advertising strategies to accommodate us and we’ve all been too thick to see it.
Madness, you say? Not so, I must reply. I say this because if there is news that matters to us, we’ll sniff it out one way or the other. It simply looks to me like Nintendo has picked up on that and realized they don’t have to pump insane amounts of money into advertising for a game that were going to find out about and buy anyways. So it only makes sense that they would take the money that they’re saving and use it to draw in a crowd that won’t actively seek out new games but will buy them if marketed to correctly. But I digress, we are not forgotten.
As I said a moment ago, if you had asked me six or seven months after launch I would have said yes, we have been forgotten. Looking at the library at that point in time, there just wasn’t that much for us diehard fans. There were some promising games on the horizon however. But as time went on some of those games were either cancelled, like Project H.A.M.M.E.R., while others simply faded further and further into obscurity, such as Sadness. Those that survived and hit shelves began to form a rather respectable library. We eventually ended up with an assortment of core titles like Okami, SSX Blur, Zack and Wiki, Metroid Prime 3, Geometry Wars Galaxies, Super Mario Galaxy, No More Heroes, Madworld and more.
In short, we were not at all forgotten. We were simply trusted to learn about these games on our own, and when we stopped getting an IV drip of information about the games we were interested in and stopped having loads of advertising thrown in our faces we assumed we had been abandoned, and instead of picking up the slack ourselves we just started to moan about it and cry that we had been forgotten. We chose not to look at the fact that Nintendo continues to work on at least one if not two new Zelda titles at present. We have chosen to forget that there is a new Mario game in the works. We ignore the fact that Retro Studios is less than likely to be sitting around on their hands instead of working on a new title. And let us not forget that Nintendo only chose not to show Kid Icarus at E3 last year because they said they were not yet satisfied with it.
We have not been forgotten. Instead we have been trusted to fend for ourselves and we opted not to. We opted to whine and complain. The fact that Nintendo chose to change the way they handle marketing and the distribution of information without really telling anyone was not the best idea. The fact that they trusted us to sniff out hardcore games, and we didn’t, doesn’t exactly say great things on our behalf either. Now armed with this knowledge, we must be vigilant, do our part and be proactive while Nintendo helps those that aren’t as savvy as we are. Nintendo is doing their part; we must do ours.
The Fanboy has spoken.
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Considering I don't know anyone who likes the term Core gamer or has ever used it before Nintendo did, I think they've all forgotten about us. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.
Gaming is over. It's all about the experience of a storyline and seemless world full of characters and bullet points. You know the bullet points: multiplayer, RPG stat improvement, customization, DLC. It's over pal. Mega Man 9 was the last of a dying breed.
Are we talking about THIS E3 or last year's E3?
I don't hate Nintendo, I hate the idiotic 3rd party companies that abandoned the system just making garbage.
That's mainly you, UbiSoft
There definitely are many good games for the system, but I'm not sure Nintendo can be credited for things like Madworld, Fragile, the Conduit, Capcom vs. Tatsunoko, Dead Space Extraction and No More Heroes.
It's more about 3rd parties having faith that there is an audience that owns a Wii that is interested in that sort of thing. Nintendo knows when they put out a Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Pikmin, etc. title out that it's going to fly off the shelves, partly because they're quality games and partly because they've built so much acclaim up over the years for releasing nothing but the best.
Most of them have forgotten about the gamers and only think about profit margins. Appealing to the hardcore or casual isn't because they like either one but because they see a market there. I think there are studios out there that do it for the love of games, Suda 51's Grasshopper Manufacture comes to mind. But for every Grasshopper you have how many EA/Activisions are out there?