Why is Nintendo Sports missing??

Every gamer on this planet knows that Nintendo’s third-party support has been lagging since….well, the mid 1990s. Starting with the N64 days, third-party companies had been dodging Nintendo, arguing with Nintendo, and half-assing product for Nintendo. In a rather ho-hum sense of irony, third-parties actually thrived best on the Nintendo Wii this recent generation with Just Dance, Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Lego, and others selling predominantly better for the Wii than for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Nonetheless, there’s still little third-party love for Ninty. So with that, Nintendo has to turn to their first-party and second-party games to produce the hits and produce the numbers. And this is how Nintendo has run its successful campaign, with a heavy dosage of first-party hits and classics. The 14 best-selling games on the Wii are first-party titles. The 9 best-selling games on the Gamecube were first-party games.

But there is a genre of gaming that Nintendo has not covered in recent years: the sports genre.



Yes, every so often we’ll see a sports game on the Wii like Wii Sports or Punch-Out but the sports simulators themselves are severely lacking—beginning with baseball and continuing with tennis, basketball, golf, etc. What really makes this baffling is that there used to be a cluster of games known as Nintendo Sports in the N64 days that produced some of the biggest hits and the greatest sports games of all-time. So why not bring it back Nintendo?The next generation is around the corner, why not for old times' sakes try to re-enter the sports/extreme sports realm when the WiiU comes out?

Sports is the last frontier for first-party gaming. Next Level Games, Camelot, Intelligent Systems, and Monster Games are all companies under the Nintendo barrier that are capable of making great sports games. And with the only licensing issue being the football video games, what’s preventing Nintendo from unleashing the Nintendo Sports moniker? And it’s not like the sales weren’t there, with Nintendo Sports in the N64 days creating 8 million-sellers. And it’s not like sports games don’t sell, with the Madden, NBA 2K, and FIFA brands selling millions on a yearly basis.



So with sports games usually being a million-seller off the gate, and even with Nintendo earning some million-sellers (Mario Strikers Charged, Punch-Out, Wii Sports, Wii Sports Resort) , it’s a no-brainer for Nintendo Sports to make a comeback to counter the heavy sports/Fantasy League audience that the United States has become.



Right?