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Wednesday, October 19, 2022

FIFA 23 Legacy Edition for Nintendo Switch has the Saddest Launch Article Ever

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - I'm fairly confident there's nothing less compelling than this in press release history.

It is no secret that Electronic Arts (and EA Sports in particular) doesn't like Nintendo. This includes years of these “legacy editions” of their games that don't change things from year to year, including bizarre things like releasing games on the Wii but not on the Wii U... in 2014. However, they eventually did release FIFA on the Nintendo Switch, only to drop the exciting new modes of it with no sign of Alex Hunter.

However, for FIFA 23 Legacy Edition, they actually put together a press release that Nintendo published. I don't believe they did that for the previous games; if they did, it's no longer available on nintendo.com. It is the saddest press release for a new game launch I've ever read. Let's go through it together.

“Note: You can save 50% on FIFA 23 Legacy Edition when you buy in-game in FIFA 22 or FIFA 21 Legacy Editions. FIFA 23 Legacy Edition will feature the same gameplay features and modes from FIFA 22 Legacy Edition without any new development or significant enhancements.”

You can see that FIFA 22 Legacy Edition—itself unchanged from FIFA 21 Legacy Edition (which itself is unchanged from FIFA 20 Legacy Edition...I don't know how far back this goes.) is hyperlinked, but FIFA 21 isn't. That's because FIFA 21 and all versions before that have actually been removed off the Nintendo eShop. The only games you can still buy are the “new” FIFA 23 and FIFA 22, as well as free commentary DLC packs in various non-English languages (Russian [at least someone isn't boycotting Russian this year!], Dutch, Arabic, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese) for FIFA 21, FIFA 22, FIFA 23, and on the Switch version of the eShop (as opposed to nintendo.com) for FIFA 20 and FIFA 19. The DLC doesn't do anything without the game it's associated with, of course.

So there's no new development or enhancements and the gameplay is the same. Why would you bother with a 50% discount? You should offer a 100% discount and just make it a Game-as-a-Service, since that's the amount of effort put into it. I see people criticise Splatoon 3's right to exist when Splatoon 2 is on the same console, but that's had noticeable and impactful development enhancements and new gameplay features and modes. So it goes into the existing modes introducing that bullet list with the unconvincing:

“The following Game Modes will be included in FIFA 23 Legacy Edition with the same features from FIFA 22 Legacy Edition:”

If you care about the bullet list contents, you can read them for yourself, but the funniest part is the last sentence of the press release:
“If you’d like to purchase the game, please visit the link below.”

With the link being, of course, to the nintendo.com page for FIFA 23 Legacy Edition. Now, does that line sound like a strong call-to-action by a marketer who is confident in the product they are trying to promote? There's no enthusiasm. You can pretty much read the cry for help between the lines. There's no reason presented in this article to go buy it. Why bother? It's not like they had to write this. They didn't for the previous ones. But not only did they write this, but they also sent it to everyone with a Nintendo Switch via the in-system Nintendo Switch News application.

FIFA 23 Legacy Edition Nintendo Switch News article call to action
They're practically begging me by the end to spend money on their no-effort release, since they can't sell it on its merits.



Hopefully this should serve as a lesson to copywriters out there for what not to do. That said, Ludwig has no access on the metrics of the launch article—it could be that the data actually has this as a super-well-performing article and the game is selling a lot of copies. It IS somehow in the top 30 of the eShop's BEST SELLERS category, at number 29, though it's unclear how much of an actual accomplishment that is.


It's unclear what the price of the game is when the base cost is also 50% off and you're upgrading from a prior year.
For arguably an even sadder marketing display, Nintendo themselves might take it with Everybody 1-2-Switch.

4 comments :

  1. I've been a bit salty for a while that FIFA games apparently have an actual esports community and not so much PGA Tour. Like, I could actually learn how to play PGA Tour.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's...um...whatever this is. https://www.pgatour.com/eseries.html

      Delete
    2. Yeah...some of the first words on the front page are, "compete for a chance to win VIRTUAL currency". If it doesn't have prize money, real prize money, it's not an esport.

      Delete

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