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Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Nintendo shouldn't buy Third Party IPs

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Not by themselves, anyway.

There are two kinds of annoying people out there with regards to Nintendo opinions and third parties. The first is that Nintendo itself should go third party, pulling a SEGA. This is flat-out stupid.

The second is pretty much the opposite: Nintendo should buy third-party intellectual properties and make them Nintendo franchises. This thought is said by Nintendo fans who think that Nintendo manages its own properties better than third-parties do with theirs. So they say, "Nintendo should buy Sonic from SEGA!" Or, "Nintendo should buy Mega Man from CAPCOM!"

Note that no one is saying that Nintendo should buy Pac-Man from Bandai Namco, because Pac-Man is terrible and no one gives a shit about him except Health.

Pac-Man vomit figure green goop
Pac-Vomit.

Why are these Nintendo fans in particular annoying? Because it is just so easy to prove them wrong, as KoopaTV is about to do.

Charge 1: Third parties are abusive of their own intellectual properties.

The most famous example here is Mega Man and Capcom. Mega Man has had several of his games canceled by Capcom, leaving him "Left 4 Dead", as it were. That, or he's just been humiliated. The biggest news that Mega Man fans have gotten is that he got into Super Smash Bros. 4 at all, and was honestly treated pretty well there. Then we look at Sonic, and, you know, after the debacles of Sonic Lost World and Sonic Boom, SEGA is downsizing itself and pretty much staying away from the console market now. That exclusive deal with Nintendo was a complete disaster. Meanwhile, classic SEGA franchises like Jet Set Radio, Super Monkey Ball, Shenmue, and SEGA Bass Fishing are either ignored or are released as really bad products, or both.

And... it's true. Some franchises from select third parties are ignored or treated poorly. But to act like Nintendo doesn't do this itself is absurd. Which leads to...

Charge 2: Nintendo is better with its franchises than third parties.

That charge is completely ridiculous. Ask any MOTHER fan. Ask any F-Zero fan. This idea was put on prominent display when every jackass out there besides KoopaTV thought that Capcom was for sale.

Heck, go ask any fan of Yoshi. For over a decade now, Yoshi has been outsourced by Nintendo to suffer under Artoon/Arzest (depending on the year)! These have resulted in disastrous games like Yoshi's Island DS and the recently-released Yoshi's New Island.

"But Nintendo is publishing Yoshi's Woolly World and it's being made by competent people at Good-Feel!" Yeah, and it's one of my top games to look out for in 2015. But Yoshi had to suffer for SO LONG to finally get a fighting chance at an actually good game. It's actually comparable to Mega Man, except Mega Man got over a dozen great games in his collective franchise before his hiatus while Yoshi got a grand total of... one.

Even if Nintendo does have the man-power for its own franchises, lately they've been ruining them. See: Paper Mario: Sticker Star. Do you want an Ace Attorney game with no story and no characters? People have called for Nintendo to buy Ace Attorney from Capcom, after all. (And they REALLY think that'd get Ace Attorney Investigations 2 localised faster.)

If Nintendo can't service its old franchises while meeting the demands of people to produce new franchises like Splatoon, how the hell is it going to be able to buy IPs from other companies and make games for those, too? Buy the employees at those companies, too? Just hire a huge amount of people? Well, if it was that simple, why haven't they done that to begin with? (Probably because it's not that simple!)

A look at popular (and unpopular) third-party IPs.

To close this article off, look at the data below collected from Super Smash Bros. For Wii U's Conquest mode:

Super Smash Bros. For Wii U Special-Guest Showdown Sonic Pac-Man Mega Man Conquest online Nintendo Network third parties fight it out
It's Pac-Man vs. Sonic vs. Mega Man, going from (clockwise): World, Japan, Americas, and Europe + Oceania.

Mega Man obviously has the closest affinity to Nintendo. This is obvious, considering that Mega Man started on Nintendo systems. Sonic started as an enemy to Nintendo. ...Pac-Man started, and continued, to have nothing at all to do with Nintendo and he never should've been in this game.

Look at the Europe numbers compared to the other ones. It's well-known and comical that Mega Man and Europe don't get along well. This is because Capcom just did not try to market Mega Man in Europe, and some of his games came out very late or never at all in Europe. This is especially true in the United Kingdom, where Mega Man is practically an unknown. To the point where a Magikarp is more popular in the United Kingdom and Australia than Mega Man. The fact that Europe's lack of exposure to Mega Man is reflected in the Conquest results so strongly is evidence enough that Conquests are based off of popularity, not what character is better. After all, it's pretty easy to get points. This means they are a valid proxy for popularity.

However, between America and Europe + Oceania, the points that Mega Man lost all went to Sonic. None went to Pac-Man. Why? Because no one cares about Pac-Man. He's very unpopular, proven in the one vs. one match-up between him and Kirby in the Conquest results earlier, talked about in the first hyperlink of this article. And Pac-Man regularly does dismally in the GameFAQs character contests, also talked about in that hyperlink.

So if there is one thing to learn from this article, it's that if Nintendo IS convinced to buy a third-party franchise, it should definitely NOT be Pac-Man! And hopefully, with Mega Man's obvious popularity, Capcom will focus on him. ...As for Sonic, well, SEGA can't be trusted to make good games anymore. Good luck with that!


Ludwig is happy to turn articles into rants against people or things he dislikes, whether it be Pac-Man, Shigeru Miyamoto, NeoGAF, or Barack Hussein Obama. That's definitely not uncommon on KoopaTV! If you supported a character in the Smash 4 conquest, or you have a feasible solution to how Nintendo can buy third party properties and actually use them, use that comments section and voice it!

2 comments :

  1. >nobody cares about pac-man

    delete this article smh

    ReplyDelete

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