#why hasn't Nintendo released them to other countries too

[the-cosmicbeans]

a VERY early birthday gift, but I finally got a Shiver plushie!

she's really cute and I love her! However, I just wish Deep Cut plushies weren't so ridiculously hard to get 😭

[aeonknight]

Thoughts on the Nintendo Direct!

New Mario and Luigi game. Cool! Let's hope it's good, unlike the last few

Don't really care about Nintendo World Championship or the Fairy Tale game.

That RPG looks cool, might pick it up if it goes on sale.

I don't give a shit about Nintendo Switch Sports

Mio looks cool, I think it's a metroidvania from the brief look but it's hard to tell. The art is lovely though and I'm almost certainly going to grab it at some point. Definitely giving Hollow Knight which is one of my favorite games.

Don't care about Disney, I honestly don't know anyone who played Illusion Island.

Honestly the Hello Kitty game looks kinda cute, might pick it up for my sister because she loves Sanrio.

Don't care about Looney Tunes or sports games so this does nothing for me.

Among Us stuff that we already knew, nothing surprising.

Ooh you can tell this guy worked on Fairy Tale lmao. Honestly I don't care about another farming sim monster collector. Somehow that specific genre mix has become overplayed. Also the name is dumb.

Oh, I was hoping for a new Donkey Kong Country game but it's a remake. Eh. I don't really care about it unless they add something new which they probably won't.

Oh yay, another remake of a game I don't care about. They'll probably charge full price for it, too. The pixel art is very pretty though. Why are they releasing 3 before 1 and 2 though? I'm happy for the Dragon Quest fans, just not a series I like. Maybe if they're not full price I'll try them. Maybe I'll just emulate the originals.

A funko game? Conceptually kinda funny actually. It's giving Lego Dimensions. But I hate Funko and think they look like garbage so I won't under any circumstances be buying this game.

Pretty sure we already knew Luigi's Mansion 2 was coming to switch but it's my favorite game in the series so I'm still excited.

This reads like a game from the ps2 era that never got adapted in English and finally the cult fandom is going to be excited but I have never heard of Denpa Men so I don't care.

Not a metal slug fan so I don't care.

I tried Darkest Dungeon, wasn't for me. But I know it's really good and popular so I'm still excited for other people for the sequel, but I hope it's not an exclusive.

I don't have NSO so I don't care about NSO stuff. Also I've already emulated Zero Mission and that's the only one of these I care about.

Another entry in a series I've not heard of, and Marona's voice is really annoying, so no chance I pick it up.

I don't play fighting games or beat em ups.

New Mario Party. Rad. I wish I were more excited but we've had exactly one decent entry in the last dozen so... not optimistic. Playable Ninji is fun though. Motion controls are gross though. Don't care about the 20 player mode, it looks like just a minigame rush and they made it 20 player so they could technically say the new game is 20 players.

NEW 2D ZELDA LET'S GO! And Zelda is playable? Amazing. I'm not the biggest fan of the artstyle, it's not bad just not my favorite, but still I'm excited. I doubt it'll be very... plotty, but still cool. The lack of actual combat is kinda dumb though.

Don't give a shit about Just Dance. Or pop music, actually. Also their subscription is ridiculous and awful.

A Horizon Lego game? That's. Not something I think anyone wanted. Especially since there hasn't been a good Lego game in years.

I don't really care about Stray being ported to Switch. Good game but one I've already played, I'm not going to buy it again.

LotR life sim? Sure. Why not. Might as well. I don't know, it's fine but not like. Life changing or anything.

I would care more about Ace Attorney Investigations if... you know... the games were any good. Unfortunately they suck so whatever. It's nice that Investigations 2 is finally available in English officially though.

Generic anime tactics game. It's giving Danganronpa but worse. Which makes sense because it's made by the DR devs. Maybe I'll play it, maybe there won't be any transphobia this time.

Another RPG I don't care about.

Prime 4. Huh. I mean cool I guess but like. I really wish they'd rerelease 2 and 3 first. Also this 100% confirms to me that they're not planning on releasing a new console soon. No way they'd announce this big of a release and have it be on a console that they're going to make obsolete soon.

[teaveetamer]

Perhaps a bit of tinfoil hat time but also analyzing based on facts time. I've heard that Amazon Japan offered 40-50% discount on Nopes. I've also heard a number of European countries offered around 40% discount. I've recently heard even Amazon USA offered about 25% discount too. To me, this means: the game isn't selling well in Japan and Europe, and while selling in North America, it's WAY less than anticipated. Nintendo almost never allows discounts this early; especially not 2 months into it.

From the discount numbers, we can infer that it's doing the worst in Japan; no surprises there. Apparently it's doing almost as badly in Europe; a surprise for me, but perhaps expected. The North American market is the one to watch tho: supposedly, Japanese fans accuse devs of pandering to the West. But according to the discount data? It's still doing bad enough in USA to warrant a nearly 25% discount anyway. What does this mean? I'd bet this game hasn't sold more than 500k copies worldwide.

This next part is a stretch hence the tinfoil hat part. But if we assume the game has only sold around 500k worldwide (130k in Japan, maybe 100k in Europe, 300k in North America), then that means that this game could struggle to even break 1m at all. Hence the emphasis on shipped vs sold in the Twitter. This also means that if it won't reach 1m, it's financially worse than OG FE Warriors, which reached 1m within a full year of release. Would this game be considered pure financial failure if so?

And if Hopes is then deemed a financial failure now, what does this mean re: DLC potential? Will it be outright cancelled? Will IS/KT just consider Fodlan brand as dead to them from now on? But perhaps most importantly: what lesson will they take away about WHY Nopes failed? Will they draw the correct conclusions at all? Will they understand that making fan favorites OOC is the wrong way to sell a fan service game? Will they understand that fans don't want Ladle pandering in every damn game?

Okay a few points:

First, I'll say that Nintendo is not responsible for discounting the game. Amazon (and any retailers who do discount the game) are. You will still buy the game for full price at the eShop or any retailer that has a deal with Nintendo not to discount new copies of the game. I don't know what arrangement Amazon or the sellers through Amazon have with Nintendo, but apparently they are allowed to discount.

Amazon discounts because they don't really like keeping stuff lying around. Many companies try to operate on a "just in time" system of stocking, meaning they want exactly as many copies as they're going to sell as soon as they're going to sell them, because that way they can simply get the product and immediately send it out. This greatly reduces or even eliminates the need for warehouses and storage, which are basically big money sinks that accomplish and produce nothing. If you're curious about a lot of the stock shortages in America that have been happening thanks to the pandemic and other issues, you can learn a lot about this.

Amazon does not want these games on their shelves. And, apparently, neither do a lot of sellers through Amazon. So they'll do anything they can to get them out of their warehouses ASAP (after all, the space those games sit in, not selling, is space they could be using to hold other pre-release games that people will buy). Good games that sell don't usually get discounts that steep and especially not that fast.

(Also as a side note, Nintendo very rarely discounts anything they create themselves. It's part of their philosophy. They view discounting games as punishing people who supported and purchased the game right away, at full price.)

What this tells me is not necessarily that the game is selling poorly, but that retailers anticipated much higher demand than there ended up being, and they over-stocked the game. That could honestly be for a lot of reasons, but I'm guessing it's due to people assuming Hopes would do well based on 3H's interest, without taking into account that fewer people were naturally going to be interested in a Warriors-style spinoff game. Then the poor word of mouth among the fanbase didn't exactly help.

Second, I don't know if I would go as low as 500k worldwide. If you look at Nintendo's earning reports, approximately 20% of their sales come from Japan, and about 80% comes from outside of Japan (~43% comes from the Americas, and about 25% from Europe. The remaining 10% is from "other" so I assume that's like Australia, Africa, etc.). This is for ALL of their products sold in a year, but let's just use it as a rule of thumb here and assume individual titles will also have similar distributions.

So if we assume that 130k is about 20% of Hopes's sales, that means it's sold ~650,000 copies worldwide. But I think sales have also been lower in Japan than expected, meaning the proportions could be off, so that's a lowball number.

As for if that qualifies it as a financial failure, the answer is... we have no idea. Nintendo probably did a whole break-even analysis when they were developing, so they know how much the game cost to produce and how many copies they want to sell to make their money back and profit. 650,000 copies is a flop if they were expecting to sell 2 million, but it's a great success if they were only planning on selling 200,000.

I'd err toward assuming it's selling less than they wanted it to, just based on the number of copies shipped to retailers and the aggressive marketing tactics they're using (that 1 million shipped tweet was definitely something I'm side-eyeing). But how much of a failure, if it even is one, is something we will probably never be privy to unless they share their sales targets with us.

As for DLC, I'd say it really depends. If the DLC is already done, or nearly done, then they'll likely release it anyway just to try and recoup some of the development costs. However, if they haven't started making it then there's a good chance it'll just be canned since it's not worth the risk. Same deal happened with Mass Effect Andromeda. They had plenty of DLC planned for it, but since the game got such bad press and needed so many bug fixes and other things, it was pretty much scrapped wholesale.

They could also cancel DLC if they're afraid of what it'll do to their image. Like, I'm pretty sure they released Hopes with the expectation that they would get to finish it later with a fourth route. There's definitely elements pointing to the possibility (like, the art book has an entire fourth section called "Blackened Embers" which features the concept art for most of the church characters and others like Byleth and Jeralt IIRC). But the game was obviously poorly recieved in a lot of ways, so now you either leave it in the state that pissed your consumers off, or you risk potentially pissing them off even more and damaging your brand by saying "Haha sorry about that sucky game we gave you. We'll fix it for you for the low, low price of $19.99!" (soooo you already charged me for a pile of shit, and now you want to charge me before you clean up the steaming pile of shit you dumped on my lap?)

I don't necessarily think we should deem it as a financial failure if DLC isn't announced within the next few months but like... It's also definitely not a good sign.

Also sorry this took me awhile to get to! I wanted to give a thoughtful response and I was doing stuff this Saturday