The Non-Existent and Suddenly Now Required Hype Machine of Nintendo

Look at this trailer. Honestly, take a good look at it. It doesn’t reveal too much plot but unveils enough content to get you excited for a movie that is still many, many months away. And when that time finally, finally comes it will dismantle the box office and will handily walk away with millions of dollars without a single review actually affecting it. Marvel and Disney have now become the kings of hype in the Hollywood business. They have taken familiar properties and made each movie a major event, a major chapter in the comic book universe. And unless there is a total, epic flop to the likes of a Green Lantern, then we are going to see their strategy remain consistent for years to come.




Activision has essentially copied this strategy by making every November the month of the Call of Duty. They have thrown three different companies to make these games to ensure that there is no cancellation, no delay, no issue, and a meticulous consistent schedule. With the video game industry being as cutthroat as ever, Activision’s yearly delivery of Call of Duty games has been a near miracle, and the astounding success that follows shows that gamers don’t mind the product in the least bit. And with the upcoming version releasing for the XBox One, PS4, PS3, and XBox 360 we will be sure to see more great financial numbers arriving for what has become the biggest third-party publisher in the land.



Notice we are missing a company in there…





Nintendo has once again lost another third-party franchise because of its WiiU still utterly lacking in third-party sales. And this leaves Nintendo without a consistent presence in the month of November. Yes granted they do use the month often, but there isn’t an anticipation for the month unlike that of the online FPS community with their Call of Duty. What Nintendo is totally lacking is their convincing of American and European gamers to look forward to November and a consistent output of video games. Even though we have seen plenty of Super Mario on the WiiU, we have yet to see Zelda, Samus, Kid Icarus, Fox, Captain Falcon, Kirby, and even Pikachu make some noise on the system.

Nintendo needs to adapt the Marvel technique of releasing games. Nintendo needs to set release dates for popular franchises well ahead of time and build the hype through posters, through trailers, through sneak peeks from other games, and through perky rumors that will invade the Twitter and Gaming Universe. No more secret release dates, no more uncertainty until merely months before the actual release, and biggest of all no more scattered release dates. They need to realize that great games will die a quick death if given an awful release date no matter how good it might be. Eternal Darkness was a psychological horror video game released in 2002 in the month of-----June. If they had simply waited until late September/early October in the Halloween season we probably would have gotten a different result. Nintendo has a strong brand connection and needs to find a way to keep the hardcore crowd excited while entice the curiosity of those looking from outside the bubble.

Pretend like Nintendo tomorrow unveils this upcoming major gaming lineup:

Super Smash Brothers 4:
November 2014


Star Fox: Alpha Unit:
September 2015


Metroid: Extinction:
November 2015


The Legend of Zelda: Beyond the Grave:
September 2016


Super Mario World 3: Triple Threat:
November 2016


Pokemon Universe:
November 2016

Wouldn’t that entice curiosity out of you, even if it might be years before you actually see the game? Wouldn’t it stir up conversation? Wouldn’t it stir up the slightest bit of controversy seeing this lineup? Now, not all games have to attach a long-time-from-here release date, but the major franchises deserve this hype, deserve the press months before the finished product even arrives. And you and I both know that we will see most (hopefully all) these franchises on the WiiU, so why not give us some anticipation to chew on? Why not give us a couple first-looks and first-glimpses to get us excited? Give us small trailers, some awesome posters, something.

Avengers 2 is still 7 months away and it is the most discussed movie of the entire month of October. And that was all because of a trailer. Nintendo’s brands and franchises and fanbases are strong enough to draw the similar type of hype. You can’t spit a small E3 trailer and be done---remind us of what’s coming. With Nintendo pretty much being all by itself with this generation, it needs to churn out as much as possible out of the exclusive IPs that it owns. Smash Brothers this year would be the perfect jump-starter for these other franchises to grow some fans, grow some hype, grow some anticipation, and give the Nintendo WiiU some desperate life.



Nintendo, you have great ideas being done by talented people. Let the world be aware of this.

How Destiny Went Hollywood to Survive the Negativity

So, you are a big gaming company with a big video game coming out. At least $300 million was spent on this game. At least.


You secretly realize that your game may not turn out as well as you planned.


Gaming journalists are highly anticipating getting their first look at the game before it releases to the public. So the question is, do you give it to them and absorb the upcoming mediocre reviews? Or do you limit the pre-release reviews, limit the press, and just allow for the opening weeks to attempt to win back the money coldly spent on the heavy marketing and the game itself? Well of course Bungie and friends chose the latter, launched a layer of journalism controversy when the reviews started arriving, and it overshadowed the great opening week. Also overshadowing the criticisms were the barrage of cool commercials flying left and right on all your cable networks.

Time will tell if the seemingly vengeful reviews will negate some of the sales in the long run but one thing is for certain: the 2 million it gained on opening week can overcome any obstacle leading up to it. Taking a page from the Hollywood Blockbuster, we are seeing an increase in companies releasing AAA titles with extreme hype and plenty of incentives on that opening week before anybody can realize how flawed it just might be. While smaller and indie games depend on the good reviews (more so than movies to be honest) to make its way to a successful run, the blockbuster strategy allows for companies like Activision to just have a good hype train to make back its money before the criticism can even arrive.

Call of Duty owns November every single year---no matter how bad the game may or may not be. American gamers love familiar shoot em’ up/online territory, and Call of Duty has become that go-to franchise. Selling 9 million at least per game since Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty claims the month of November, starts the hype from the summer, and allows for the dedicated fanbase to do the rest. Movies do best in the summer, while video games do best in the fall---especially in the months of September (Halo, Grand Theft Auto 5) and November.

Video game creation is tough, because making games that have the AAA look cost more than ever. They cost the amount of a summer film. So the goals in the past 5-7 years have shifted to instead of catering to the gaming journalists that can spread the good word around, they decided to invade the ad space of popular websites and invade the television sets. Long gone are the days when Mario Kart: Double Dash got a 7.9 from IGN and launched a wave of controversy. IGN and Gamespot don’t have the power of before, and we see magazines and websites like 1up and Gone Gold falling by the wayside.

The Hollywood trend has been in gaming for a while, but Destiny is arguably the first example of a game that not only managed to overcome the negative reviews, but managed to overcome the gamer outcry and gaming website’s seemingly disdain taste for the new franchise. And this might be the sign for things to come as now places like IGN don’t get the easy access to new games if the big companies don’t believe in it. Destiny survived the Twitter negativity, and few things can ever survive Twitter hate.

Although I don’t see Eastern Hemisphere gaming giants like Nintendo tread down this path (Nintendo doesn’t even really believe much in the power of having the right release date) Western Hemisphere companies like Activision, EA, and Ubisoft follow suit with focusing its budget more on marketing and less on the game itself. It might come off as cruel and misleading to the gaming public but consider this: the gaming industry doesn’t allow for you to flop and survive. Flops can cripple the biggest of gaming companies no matter what the track record is. Midway Games did amazing in the 90s with NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, and Mortal Kombat. Now it’s in the middle of Chapter 11. The gaming industry is cruel, and every possible edge will be used to ensure that the companies of today don’t fall like the companies that struggled to get out of the 90s and 2000s.

Although video games make more money than movies nowadays, expect gaming companies to look as summer blockbusters when figuring out a way to churn out guaranteed hits. It has worked for Call of Duty (a franchise that never releases a game with more than 2 hours of single-player gameplay) and Destiny (A seemingly incomplete and bugged-out game)---so expect the strategy to expand.

Winning the Holiday requires going to War

Alright, we all just saw the trailer for the newest Call of Duty that will definitely release in November. Now that you have seen this trailer, let’s spit out some statistics:


The Xbox 360 starting with Modern Warfare and continuing through the third installment has sold over 48 million copies of a Call of Duty game---equaling $2,880,000,000 at least in revenue.


The PS3 starting with Modern Warfare and continuing through the third installment has sold over 38 million copies of a Call of Duty game---equaling $2,280,000,000 at least in revenue.

Call of Duty has made over 5 billion dollars in revenue amongst the Modern Warfare and Black Ops series. If we even include prior versions within the PS3 and Xbox 360 library and throw in the Wii numbers, you would have to add 24.15 million copies, which would add $1,207,500,500 at least in revenue.

All in all, Call of Duty has sold over 110 million copies in the past generation at least, and has sales revenue adding to over 7 BILLION dollars.

The big question is: what do we call Nintendo if they don’t push for Black Ops 2 to become a launch title? Would there even be a word that could describe it? You want a good launch? Like it or not, Call of Duty better darn be one of those launch titles. It only makes too much $en$e.

Source: Here

The Backwards Progression of Quantity in Gaming

When Super Mario World first came out way back in 1991, it boasted 96 levels. A number of levels that high had never even been an afterthought in the early 90s, as gaming was just beginning to develop a personality and an image in the world of entertainment. In the NES days, 20 stages was considered an excellent amount. Super Mario World however broke the mold in a fathom of ways. Not only did it nearly hit the 100-level plateau, but did it without having to sacrifice any other aspects of the game---the background art, the pacing, the design, the music, and the overall quality of the game. It was a hands-down masterpiece, and from an early stage tested the limits of the Super Nintendo with its quantity as well as its quality.

Fast-forward to today. We barely can find video games that can hit past 90 levels, and some of the biggest video gamers out there can be beaten in just a couple hours. Halo 3’s campaign mode can be beaten in a fast 2-3 hours. The newer Call of Duty games focus so much on the multi-player that they cut back on the single-player mode by a substantial amount. Remember the endless days you worked on Super Metroid? Well, Metroid: Other M barely checks in at past 15 hours. Kirby Super Star for the SNES has 7 games embedded in it, including an updated version of Kirby’s Adventure. The latest Kirby game can be beat in 5-6 hours. Worst of all even the RPGs are becoming notoriously smaller. Pokemon Gold/Silver contained 16 badges, an Elite Four, and so much to do the game pack was barely able to contain it. The latest Pokemon game is still at a meager 8 badges, and still doesn’t have the badly-needed tournaments that we always see on the anime.


Now, before you mention that it’s Nintendo and only Nintendo lacking the progression, the other companies are not off the hook. The Final Fantasies of the 90s have far more gameplay and storyline to cover than the ones of today. The Gran Taurismo franchise seems to spin its wheels often after the second installment, which boasted over 100 cars to collect. The fourth one? Not even close....just 50 more cars and a dirty dozen more tracks--which are mostly retreads of previous installments. Sonic the Hedgehog 4 could have been beaten in one afternoon, while the Genesis Sonic games contained longer levels, and more of them. We still don’t have an action/adventure game from any non-Nintendo company that comes even close to hitting the amount of gameplay hours required to beat Ocarina of Time, and that game has been around for over a decade.

What the heck is going on? The games are still being sold at massive prices, similar to that of back in the 90s, but the amount of gameplay contained in the games have diminished. We have seen gameplay being shelled out and replaced with cinematic scenes, higher-quality graphics, and more multi-player goodies that occupy most of the space of the disk. Remember when the Playstation won the gaming war because the CDs were cheaper and can fit much more content? What is the excuse of the gaming industry for still not progressing in terms of amount of actual gameplay content in their video games? Picture this: when Super Mario World came out, the IPod had not been invented, and the game had over 70 stages (The 96 levels boasting was a mild lie, it actually has 96 different ways of beating a level). New Super Mario Bros. Wii, the best-selling platform game of the past generation, only has 70-80 levels. And New Mario Bros. was by no means a graphical achievement.

Some may argue that the graphics and difficulty of 3-D game production has led to shorter games. And to this, I bid bull. Check out the games that pushed the limits of the SNES graphics: Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid, Star Fox, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. They did not just provide top-notch graphics at its time; they were also all lengthy games (with Star Fox slightly being the exception). Hell, let’s go to a Game Boy game called Wario Land 2. That game has over 50 stages for crying out loud!! We still have 2-D games nowadays, as they’ve made a recent surge in popularity, but they still don’t hit the quantity amount of Mario World. We still don’t have a racing game that is fearless enough to give us more than 40 tracks to race in.

With the technology we possess in our hands, seeing that televisions look better than movie screens and we can communicate with someone and visually see them (even though they might be thousands of miles away) with a small computer, why in the heck are we not at a point in which games take ions to beat? Why are we not at a point in which we see 2-D games with 200 levels, or racing games banking in 75 levels?

This is because gamers are not only a crazy supportive breed, but we tend to look past the shortcomings just because we are so hungry for the next game. Gamers are some of the best consumers in the American economy, which is why video games make more money than movies, and is why more and more second/third-party companies are jumping ship to the industry. Everyone wants a piece of this pie. But we gamers just fork over $50 bucks no questions asked despite the fact that they are giving us less but maintaining the same price. 25 million gamers around the world bought Mario Kart Wii, even though it has 32 stages—the same exact number of stages as Mario Kart: Super Circuit---a Game Boy Advance game released 10 years ago. 20 million gamers bought Modern Warfare 2, even though it can be beaten in just 4-6 hours. Now gaming companies are relying on the Blockbuster effect: hype up the games to holy hell, so everyone buys them immediately before realizing that the game is eerily short.

Why is this lack of quantity thing an issue? Because video game sales are dying because of the resale market. The issue isn’t big now, but in the coming future we might have problems as the smaller companies might succumb to sluggish sales and have to stop competing. Now, if you create a game that requires months to beat, and then unload extra downloadable content on top of that, then the lasting appeal of your game will prevent you from trading in the game a mere month after you originally bought it (unless the game sucks, but that’s a totally different article). We have been blessed with arguably the greatest generation of video games in history, as all three competitors gave us a multitude of excellent games on a consistent basis. The war of the seventh generation had started way back in 2006, and just now we finally saw the market slow down a bit. That being said, how can the industry progress any further seeing all they accomplished in just 5 years? By increasing the value of the games, by infusing some more gameplay hours.


I want the next 2-D Mario to truly test my patience and endurance by flipping the script and doubling the amount of levels contained in Super Mario World---a video game that is turning 20 this year. I want the next Fable to keep me on my toes for months to come. I want the next Call of Duty to stretch to the length of a Tom Clancy novel as well as give us many more places to go and more places to engage in combat. I want the next big racing game to give us so many tracks it will take me months to master them all. I want an RPG that just explodes in storyline, similar to what we gamers experienced with Final Fantasy VI way back in 1994. I think we very supportive gamers deserve bigger, badder, lengthier games. Or at least not make it such a cinch to beat. Or at least give us multiple endings to gun for. Chrono Trigger back in 1995 had a dozen endings. Grand Theft Auto IV? Two. And that game is a freakin’ modern-day sandbox game.

Bottom Line: Video games need to be longer, there are no excuses for any video game that can be beaten in less than 10 hours. Yes I know there are some excellent games that can be beaten in less than 5, but those are very far and few when compared to the amount of games that are decent, slightly entertaining, but already beaten three days after you bought the thing. Back in the 80s and 90s we bled for those games, spent weeks mastering them and finally trying to beat the last level, the last boss. Games have gotten much easier and I will let that one slide, but if you are going to minimize difficulty, at least maximize the length. All companies are guilty of this, as they are all adopting the blockbuster technique of maximizing sales within the first week before anybody catches on (Nintendo is the lone exception as they rely on word-of-mouth to improve the sales).

For this next generation of gaming, I want more companies to truly test the limits of not the hardware, but its software and just how much they can fit inside their disks. Give me back my quantity. Quality doesn’t have to be sacrificed for quantity, just look at all the amazingly lengthy games from the SNES and Playstation back in the 90s.

We need a change.

I want to lose my social life to these upcoming video games, not have them continuously become a mere one-weekend activity.