Resume: Because it still gets money from a different audience than mario and zelda. Having something getting profits from a big pool rather than nothing its still a smart move
Yeah I mean even just looking at myself I can understand it. I've drifted from Nintendo quite a bit over the years, but Metroid (and Zelda) always bring me back. I've bought systems for those franchises. So they're guaranteeing that someone like me will still buy into their systems by not neglecting that corner of their market share
@@aether388 I'm right there with you. When the Switch first got announced it didn't appeal to me very much, but even then I said that the second they announce a new Metroid game for it, I'll buy one. If Nintendo ever made it clear that they weren't going to do Metroid anymore, I'm not sure I'd buy their systems. Since they do make Metroid though, I end up buying the system and dozens of games for it over the life cycle.
It brings in a new audience and has tremendous potential to grow with the right marketing. Doom 2016 made the franchsie more popular than ever before and that's likely what Nintendo should strive to mimic in terms of sales since it's the closest game I think of to Metroid Prime.
I’ve always felt Nintendo see their games lineup like a restaurant menu. They have to have a Steak meal, a Chicken meal, a Fish meal, Vegetarian, something sweet in the variety of what they sell. There is something for almost everyone, and you won’t get bored if you have another flavour of game. Not many people buy the haddock, but it’s there to give balance to the offerings. When you compare it to XBox, you can see XBox are catering to the people that like pizza 95% of the time and that’s why they’ve bought up all the other big pizza franchises.
It's over $180 million in revenue. Hardly something to dismiss as insignificant. I think the perception of success in the video game industry is skewed by the unprecedented unpredictable juggernauts that sell 30+ million copies
It's how corporations think. We don't just need money. We need all the money. More more. Faster. Cut costs. Fire workers. It seems to get worse every year
Metroid is so different from all the other Nintendo IPs, they would pretty much lose most of its fans as costumers. It's a big reason for me personally at least, to buy the new Switch.
Not all of them, sure, but every single Metroid fan where Metroid is the series that convinces them to buy a Nintendo console? Nintendo doesn't just make money off that copy of Metroid sold to them....but also off *every other game* they now buy on the console. Thats why diverse genre coverage is important. A new Metroid game might sell fewer copies than a new Mario game, but a disproportionate number of those copies will be to people newly sold on the ecosystem.
And just to note, its definitely not just a Metroid thing. Nintendo has a lot of *relatively* low selling franchises that fit this plan. Xenoblade brings in jrpg fans; Fire Emblem brings in strategy rpg fans. Hell, they just released a new Famicom Detective Club game, which would target visual novel fans. All with the ability to hit audiences who might not be sold on your typical Mario and Zelda and Pokémon stuff.
I didn't buy a wii u because I made a rule that I would wait until a Metroid game was announced for it, which didn't happen. I bought the switch when prime 4 was announced. That ended up being an accidental lie on Nintendo's part for obvious reasons, but it made me buy the console.
Man, I know that's just how it is, but aaaah is it frustrating how Metroid is not this huge franchise, man. As opposed to something like Pikmin, which is amazing don't get me wrong, it's just that Pikmin you kinda have to be there to fully understand what it is about, Metroid just has the makings of a huge IP like Zelda, Mario, Star Wars and such. I mean, the thing kickstarted a whole sub genre of videogames that are very very popular in their own space, still manages to set itself apart despite the explosion of many other metroidvanias, has sci-fi, lore, a badass protagonist that many people can gravitate towards to for multiple reason, cool designs, cool music, amazing environments, the works and yet Metroid still is relatively niche. Like aaaah, I don't get it. It has been doing alla that for more than 30 years now and it could truly be just as huge as the insanely popular Nintendo franchises. It makes me happy, however, knowing that the IP is growing. Metroid Dread, all things considered, has sold insanely well. Hopefully Prime 4 can get more people into Metroid.
I fully believe a new Metroid Prime game can do amazing numbers. The series just has not hit its escape velocity moment yet like some of the other franchises. I still remember when Animal Crossing was slept on for many years and Fire Emblem used to be barely known then exploded in popularity. The thing is you need a critical mass of releases before it spills over. Even some Zelda games sold similar numbers to Metroid games. But the constant barrage of quality Zelda games ensured the series grew exponentially in popularity. Metroid has had huge gaps in releases, not getting an N64 game for example.
@@graalcloud Yeah, true that. It's also to my understanding that Animal Crossing was kinda stagnating creatively until New Leaf came out and Awakening was just at the right place right time iirc as well as being a thoughtfully crafted experience. We've been eating good with Prime Remastered and Dread, and even Samus Returns before that, so at least right now things are going consistent. Hopefully they can keep that going on the Switch 2 with more Metroid games after Prime 4 and that they don't skip whatever comes after the Switch 2
Prime 4 is most likely gonna sell 4-5 million due to it being a launch window title for the Switch 2, benefiting from many years of exposure on the system. Almost all of the 15 best selling Switch games came out in the first 3 years of the console's life, the sooner it comes out the better. Unfortunately, Prime 4 is Nintendo's most expensive game by far and those 4-5 million will only help it break even, so the game will regardless end up being a financial loss in the end. At least it will signal to Nintendo that Metroid games can push solid numbers if they don't scrap development after 2 years and dial back the budget a little.
It can be another Zelda with new games with new powers and mechanics. The so far compelling but also minimalist / environmental storytelling and atmosphere are the most important. It's possible to even change genres, be open world, linear, dialogue heavy, etc. as long as it does it works.
They'll recoup some of those cost by making prime5 re-using tools, assets and methods of prime4. We saw Nintendo do this with high budget games before like in the Zelda series (Ocarina/Majora, Breath/Tears). In some ways we can also see Prime and Prime2 like that.
@ABSsponds I wouldnt play a metroid game of an different genre tbh. But heres an interesting idea, what if they gave a huge budget to make a metroid prime game with a great storymode, but this time went all in on making an actually good multiplayer mode as well. Metroid prime 2s multiplayer was terrible. This could blow metroid and make it an actually popular franchise
Bet it sells more if they do Ads like Prime 1 and manage to nail (what is hopefully) a Prime Hunters-style multiplayer mode but given a proper budget and the "right stuff" to make it popular.
At the bare minimum, prime 4 is a demonstration of the absolute maximum the switch hardware can run. People may not buy it as much as Mario kart or animal crossing, but it proves the switch's range.
Not quite. It runs at 60fps, so from that point alone the game could look better, if you're only talking visuals. Do they _need_ to double frametime, just to get more out of it? Not at all. Especially since Prime is plain and simply a 60fps franchise, they should never worsen that, only improve it! =D
@@BatPotatoes If Switch 2 supports it, I'd be happy if it did, yeah. That'd be more important to me than graphical improvements with diminishing returns. But if it doesn't support it, by all means, they can improve visuals as long as 60fps is the target and it doesn't dip.
It'd be like if all movie studios only made super hero and popular family properties. Yes they are the most profitable right now but there's still sizable markets for specific genres such as horror, sci-fi & fantasy, musical, etc. I think Metroid is potentially reaching an all time high in influence over the past five years, with numerous indie inspired Metroidvanias and Dread winning the game award for best action game of 2021, even for the smaller franchise I think the industry is taking notice. Not to mention that Prime 4's development team at Retro has hired staff from all over the industry, crossing borders of company/console.
The games don't even sell bad. I get annoyed with these people (especially executives) who think something doesn't sell well because they compare it to their top selling franchise. But Metroid games still sell 1.5-4 million. Yeah, it's not Pokemon or Mario numbers. But they still make plenty of profit. And like the video said, it's more important to have a presence in the market. These other companies that just dump all their IPs except the top 3 selling ones (Konami, Square, Disney, etc) eventually burn the big three. And have to go buy new IPs. You wouldn't have to buy new IPs if you had kept supporting the ones you had...
A lot of executives like to pretend that they can predict what the audience wants, but that's really not the case (especially these days with it taking so long to develop new games). It's smart of Nintendo to keep a variety of games alive on their platform as audience tastes change - Otherwise they wouldn't have success stories like Fire Emblem: Three Houses. And Nintendo's hardware being modest keeps development costs lower than they would be otherwise.
Seeing adult gamers on youtube giggling like schoolgirls over nonsense games like Mario kart, Super Smash Bros and Pokémon, whilst at the same time _Never_ having even played a Metroid game just makes me lose faith in humanity.
Because Nintendo has the ability and the will to not forget its franchises, at least not all of them, and even after their poor sales, they continue to insist on releasing games like Fzero, Metroid or Starfox. This has made them a 130-year-old company.🐐🐐🐐🐐
@@armandomarin371 There is a serious problem of favoritism inside Nintendo. I mean, surely differences of treatment are expected since some franchises are indeed much more famous than others, but the problem is when those smaller ones are too affected negatively and are denied a chance to improve and do better. So it becomes a tragic dynamic as the industry and technology moves on, the other Nintendo franchises move on and evolve, and the abandoned franchises tend to look gradually less attractive to the company because they will demand a lot of effort to be reworked to modern gameplay standards. To begin with they have the stigma of being the "failures" and are probably not well respected in the company.
Westerners trying to figure out Nintendos motivations are hilarious, did you just start paying attention to them once switch was successful? It's not about sales, maximizing shareholder value, cornering the market or any financial reasons. On the dev side, they just make new games when they have new ideas. It's driven by creatives. They don't make new FZeros because they don't know where to take the series creatively. Typically, the hardware of each generation was developed when Miyamoto had a new idea for Mario that their current hardware couldn't account for. Why do they keep making Metroid? I don't know, but looking at the companies philosophy on all of their in house games, you have to come to the conclusion that there is some sort of creative idea that these new Metroids are trying. We won't know what Prime 4 is attempting until we get our hands on it. Look at the comments, it's unfathomable that Nintendo is driven by anything but financial decisions. Our entire focus in the West is the money, and outside of Valve, early Blizzard, Supergiant and a select few others, it has never worked out for us creatively (those companies were obviously driven by creatives). There are money making franchises in the West, but they are rarely era defining, and mostly sold off of marketing.
Because it doesn't as nearly as much to make a Metroid game, and NIntendo doesn't spend hundreds of millions to make a game in any case. Their Triple A titles don't cost what a Rockstar or an Activision (now Microsoft) does.
Nintendo is a weird case: They'll either keep making games they know that won't sell a lot but still people will love and buy (like Metroid series) or they'll refuse making new games for popular franchise despite the demand they still have (like F-Zero series).
@@Vetusomaru There are franchises that don't sell like crazy but they are respected in the company, like Metroid. And there are franchises that also don't sell like crazy but they have less respect, like F Zero and Star Fox. The company has little motivation to rework those franchises to reach the potential of others, believing they have little "Nintendo quality" to offer nowadays. That's the tragedy of those franchises.
Somebody should tell this to Capcom about Mega Man as they let one of their biggest flaship series rot until they figure out they don't necessarily need to make a huge, expensive, risky AAA title. Fans of Capcom are more often than not fans of various series of theirs. When they blatantly ignore one of their supposedly important fanbases, they are not doing themselves a favor. All the time and resources that go into those action figures and model kits, crossovers that nobody asked for, or other arguable wastes of money could be going into another light, but well packed Mega Man game. For crying out loud, even a sequel to their classic series was the highest selling title in the series. It wouldn't even really lose money I'd bet. Fans are starving.
@@TayoEXE MM is very easy to make in all aspects, and it works in a way that it doesn't have real perspectives of ambitious growth. Like it wasn't meant to evolve like Zelda, from 2d to 3d with massive scale lately. There are whole subseries that aren't platformers, but they are something else, the original game is meant to stick to the formula. Still Capcom has zero interest, probably because they are too used to the sales of RE, DMC and MH and won't respect a new project that does so little. Also, and this is important in my opinion: MM works in such a basic way that it can't be abused and milked with dlc and micro transactions, unlike Street Fighter. It's probably no coincidence that SF is the only veteran franchise that Capcom returned to invest seriously... once they realized they can sell characters and costumes for years. So SF can earn a lot more after the launch. But MM doesn't give room to be milked that way. And this observation seems to make sense when we remember that Capcom made MM X Dive, the mobile game... After all, a mobile game can earn more than a regular MM game. So that's the tragedy of the franchise. Capcom became too ambitious and greedy because of the success of RE, DMC and MH.
3 million isn't "bad sales" it's low sales when compared to other games. You think all authors who aren't the biggest best sellers should just stop? No area can have everyone be at the top.
It depends on your budget. 3 million copies was a big success in during the GameCube era. But somewhere during the PS3 and 360 era, games at the AAA level started to require so much money to make that 3 million copies became a one way ticket to bankruptcy. That's one of, if not the main reason why Nintendo decided to stay one generation behind in terms of processing power with the Wii.
@@jme6036 Square Enix for example. Which is funny how the CEO was adamant of NFTs despite the fact those were obviously failures, but a Final Fantasy game that has sold well and praised like XVI but wasn't the best selling game they ever made so it was marked a failure. Conspiracy theory time, maybe because Yoshi-P actually has spoken up against NFTs so the CEO must have bias against him, but cannot rid of Yoshi-P because XIV Online is legit a money maker, and in Japanese work laws you must have a great case to fire anybody on any level - it is why you never heard of Japanese companies laying off their employees unless it was the overseas beanches.
@@ManU-kf7bt But Nintendo behaves "typically" as many other publishers at least in the sense of giving radically less attention and budget to smaller franchises than Mario, Zelda, SSB, etc. There is a clear border separating the higher ranks and lower ranks, that Metroid belongs to. And that's what this whole debate is actually based on. Metroid, Earthbound, F Zero, Star Fox, DK, Kirby, etc. Some of those are abandoned, others are almost dead, others are just very inconsistent.
I still don't quite get it. If Metroid exists to hold space in the market for more mature games, doesn't Nintendo still eventually need to make more games like that to capitalize on that particular market share? From the corporate perspective, what is the point of holding the space if you never actually profit much off it? Not saying he's wrong or that I don't like Metroid, I'm just not quite seeing the financial strategy here, am I missing something?
Making video games is hard man. Making a video game on par with Super Metroid without compromising quality or pissing the fans off is REALLY hard. Let the chefs do the cooking.
Before I even watch I was always under the impression that Nintendo keeps the lesser selling titles around for variety. Why would I buy a Nintendo platform if all they are offering is just Mario, Pokemon and Zelda because they sell the most?
Metroid rewards intuition, and problem solving If I could describe it solely. Id say Metroid is akin to one “huge 24 hour dungeon”. It’s a hard stop gap for many that they may become easily frustrated from not being able to solve it. The issue is that “the popularity” cant or wont give the series a try and learn intuitively, how to go through a metroidvania and beat it. It is certainly Nintendo's pioneered, mature audience genre, and they know it so, there will always be 3m dedicated, cognitively focused fans, that will show up for big metroid releases :). Edit: Just wanted to share my love for the franchise runs deep-Nintendo inexplicably taught me how to be investigative, at the ripe young age of six, beating Metroid Prime 2: Echoes on the Gamecube two years later at 8 in 09. To infinity and -- Beyond! 🎉
I agree. Super Metroid was my first metroidvania in general. I initially still thought it was a great game but nothing more. I then played zero mission and fusion and I happened to really fall in love with those games, probably because they were just a bit easier to get into. Those games really improved my judgment when it comes to these types of games. I went back and played super and it immediately became one of my favorite games.
Zelda was kind of similar before Breath of the Wild, but now that's got such a big audience it seems like they can't allow the player to get stuck on puzzles nearly as much. Even Echoes of Wisdom, which brings back traditional dungeons, is really easy and allows puzzles to be solved in a number of different ways. It's too bad because now we just can't expect to get that expertly designed guided experience that old Zelda use to have from that series anymore. We have to get that type of game from Metroid now, so hopefully the series doesn't get **too** popular that they make changes to it
@@athorem The main difference is that Metroid gets new games way less often, Zelda had a single formula for more than 10 games, it's an anomaly that a series can have that many titles all with the same blueprint while keeping a consistently high level of critical success, it needed to change things sooner or later to stay relevant.
So Metroid 3 was the 34th most sold SNES game. 1,42 million copies. Source: this article on english wikipedia... List_of_best-selling_Super_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_video_games
@cjeelde 34th most sold game? There's a lot to live up to on that system, so I can live with that. I don't agree with it being the 34th best game on SNES, but I can live with it.
@@itchyisvegeta The good news is that Metroid Fusion is the 23th most sold game on the GBA and Metroid Prime was the 6th best selling Gamecube game. The Metroid series in general has sold 21.6 million. Thats about the same number as Yakuza, Dynasty Warriors, and Prince of Persia.
@orangeslash1667 I actually did not like Prime on GameCube. Bought it back in the day brand new, played it for 4 hours, and couldn't get past the controls. Great game, just wasn't for me. The Switch version on the other hand was exactly for me, and I was stupid excited when they announced that with traditional twin stick GPS controls.
Bad sales is kind of overdoing it, Lackluster sales would have been a more appropriate term for Metroids sales history, Metroid may not be a system seller, but excluding Federation Force and Prime Pinball its never been a flop.
@@robertkenny1201 somehow that makes even more of a flop from Tina's perspective. Tina is my pet parrot. The parrot talks and she didn't like that game. She likes Metroid 2 for game boy pocket the best... She always requested to have that opening theme to be played on the stereo so she can dance to it...
If Nintendo stopped making Metroid and especially Xenoblade games, I would stop buying their consoles. So they sell hardware and lots more software by continuing to support my favorite IPs, even if they "underperform." Don't get me wrong; I still enjoy 3D Mario and Zelda. But not enough to continue buying consoles.
I think of it like the gaming industry/ landscape is a lot like an ecosystem. You will have dominant franchises at the top but also smaller franchises and one off games that play an equally important role in maintaining a healthy industry.
Most games average 1 million. Metroid Prime 1 was heavily inflated due to Gamecube bundles. Metroid Dread is the only game that broke this streak by selling 3 million.
Metroid games are like a generational Nintendo flex. They'll take an underpowered console and make some of the best art design around. DOOM Eternal ripped off Prime 2's aesthetics if you know where to look, and Halo 4 also had a certain Metroid Prime sheen to it (which makes sense considering Prime staff helped make it).
Dead space (the original at least) uses the EXACT same map system. It even has the same glitch as Prime where the map accidentally gets stuck upside down if you rotate it a certain way. So there's another game that has inspirations from Prime.
There's a reason why there's a whole game genre named Metroivania after all. That franchise is one these grandfather who stay cool with time and still influence younger one.
@@GBDupree I remember when everyone was freaking out about Dead Space when it came out, I tried it and it literally just felt like a ripoff of Resident Evil 4 mixed with a rip-off of Metroid Prime. Not in a bad way but you could see the inspiration from those two games, which both happen to be Gamecube masterpieces. It's funny as fuck to me that the "mature" gaming audience missed out of those games because Gamecube was widely and incorrectly smeared as a kiddy console.
I'm more surprised that metroid doesn't sell well. It's their best ip. Mario and zelda are cool, but metroid has always kept me coming back and replaying the games. I've played the metroid trilogy god knows how many times. I've played metroid dread around 65 times. Mario and zelda don't do that for me. Well, there's the xenoblade chronicles series but I haven't replayed those nearly as much due to how long it takes to beat them and do everything in them.
For you, it's their best Ip. For me, it is Zelda. you played Dread 65time. I can' even count how many time I beat OoT since 1998 or play more than 1k hour in the 2 lastest games. But for them, Mario is at the top because the plumber bring ton of profit in many different way that others franchise can bring. The biggest wall Metroid has, is about its sci-fi aspect which is not appealing to everyone. The genre itself is pretty much niche in all entertainment industry. Then there's the gameplay genre which may not be appealing to parent with their kids who are one big part of Nintendo playerbase (not the biggest which is the 16-30yo; those with free time and money).
Metroid is the best they have imo. I love how the game doesn't lose its identity unlike Zelda which has completely changed fundamentally to satisfy the open world fans.
@@brandonthompson548 Believe it or not, a game like Breath of the Wild is the type of Zelda game Nintendo has been wanting to make since the N64 era, it simply wasn't possible before due to the technological constraints.
@@Leee275 I believe it. I just prefer the traditional method of zelda vs the new one. Metroid is still very much the same as it always been and I love it for that.
@@brandonthompson548 It's a matter of taste. Managing an old franchise with a direction oriented to the past (formulaic) or to the future. Some old franchises that started in 2d work in a way that it's hard to be reimagined in 3d, but others have a better potential for that transition... and in that case it's probably a better idea to change them to 3d. That shows an intention of being open to technology advances and improve the franchise with those new tools that are very different from what existed when the games were created. And that is just an extreme example, as the 2d to 3d transition was the most intense of the whole industry, but the same goes for each new console bringing more powerful technology. It's probably better not to stay stuck in an old formula only for the sake of nostalgia.
If Metroid was released on the Xbox and PlayStation it would have sold way better. I honestly believe Metroid doesn’t match the taste of the general audience that buys Nintendo consoles. The same can be said for games like Astro Bot or Raychet and Clank, they would sell better on a Nintendo platform. At least in my opinion.
@@COFFEEBREAKRACING Yeah, Metroid is a different vibe from the typical Nintendo product. But it's not that much mature either, so it has a place to occupy in that Nintendo ecosystem. It has a hardcore gameplay model, extremely out of the box when it debuted, and was meant for older people, especially since Super Metroid, that only made it more mature and hardcore. That versatility is important and I even think Nintendo could be investing harder on that.
@@Abner_AharoniWhatever Nintendo states is irrelevant. Metroid Prime falls de facto under the FPS umbrella by virtue of being in first person and shooting being the main combat mechanic.
I feel like metroid can easily make more sales if Nintendo would focus on the marketing a little, maybe add a multiplayer mode like they did to metroid prime 2
Novody really cares about secondary multiplayer modes anymore, it's either a robust multiplayer mode you will play for hundreds of hours or nobody cares.
@oscarzxn4067 that's what I meant, a fleshed out multiplayer mode with deeper gameplay and mechanics. I guess I should've mentioned metroid prime hunters, not metroid prime 2
No it wont. 5-6 mill maybe for Prime 4. DK is the same, never a huge seller, and yet DKCTF didn't change anything. No Retro Studio's game sells astronomically, say as Platinum Games' games. Nothing wrong with lower sales. Not every game is for everyone. Let niche fanbases enjoy their niche series.
@@ItApproaches DK dosen't sell? Your kidding right DKC - 3rd best selling SNES game 13mil DKC2 - best selling SNES game that wasen't a pack in title 6.1 mil DK64 - 7th best selling SNES game 5.2 mil. DKCR - A collective 9.47 mil sold between Wii and 3DS. That's not even including surprise hits like Diddy kong racing and the land series which do surprisingly well for being smaller side piece titles. You really don't wanna underestimate DK's selling power his releases don't think he's ever dropped below the top 30 of best sellers of a console including the time he was locked behind the DK bongos and being heavily neglected.
I remember buying GC games brand new for like 20 bucks brand new. I think that with Nintendo's more aggressive pricing policy they are still probably averaging 50$ at every Dread sale. Prime Remastered started lower but I still don't see it on any meaningful sale.
Nintendo generally does not put their games on sale except in rare cases and then not by very much. They believe it devalues the games and their franchises and that lowering the price would coincide with a decrease in the public perception of their games' quality, which Nintendo has historically been extremely protective of since their very entry into the console market. (Hence the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" they required for any game Nintendo licensed for the NES to earn to demonstrate a basic level of quality for games on the NES during the time when a complete lack of quality control on other systems lead to the video game bust of the 80s since everybody lost faith in the medium.)
@@nullvoyent It's important to note as well that Nintendo - regarding sales of physical games - give full authority to retailers to put the games on whatever markdown they desire. You used to see this with Wal-Mart locations having Nintendo games cheaper than other retailers for a very long time (no idea if this is still the case, I haven't noticed it on Wal-Mart's digital storefront and haven't stepped foot in one in forever), and this persists with outlets like Costco (admittedly for only the most popular Nintendo releases). The retailers though don't utilize this often because they are still buying their stock from Nintendo at higher prices so they are less incentivized to drop the price because they spent so much on the stock. It is important to know that Nintendo's belief in this regard is true, in so far that it actually does have a positive effect on sales and their profit, and this is easily observable if you compare how high their profit margins are compared to their competitors. Sony's early sales tactics do a significant amount to devalue their games such that they no longer make profit on each sale of the game, which is a massive problem as the price of developing AAA games has increased to horrific levels. Microsoft has basically cannibalized all their game sales for Game Pass.
I believe by marketing metroid as nintendos resident evil it will work well. Resident evil is just a metroidvania in a mansion. Metroid can have some stalker enemies like Sa-X follow the player the full game
SEGA is reviving a bunch of its old franchises because they want to make movies out of them. I bet they're wishing they had been keeping all of their old franchises relevant like Nintendo, because most of those SEGA franchises really fell off the map and probably aren't as big of a draw for a movie. But Metroid likely would be a big draw for a movie despite its humble sales. Probably not exactly what the guy in the interview meant, but it shows that keeping franchises alive is important. You cannot make big plays like creating a video game movie with something you don't have.
Nintendo has a number of abandoned franchises, and others that get little to no attention, and others that are fairly inconsistent in releases. And some franchises are like cult classics... Metroid, Earthbound, etc. But that status only belongs to few cases. It's incorrect to make it sound (at least as it appeared to me) like it's the general case in Nintendo. Though it's true that even the smallest Nintendo franchises did better and lasted longer than those classic Sega franchises. Secondly, the preservation of the image of smaller franchises has a lot to do with SSB, instead of Nintendo's own management. And Sega doesn't have something like SSB to help their games.
They have always been experimental with both of their hardware and software, keeping niche series alive is a way to show they are always willing to provide more than one way of interacting with the medium, which is what has always made them successful.
Not the sufficient "hit" that matters to Nintendo so that they change their minds and start giving the franchise more attention and resources. The fact is that nothing has changed, the game is still the Nintendo niche.
Thank you! 100% agreed. An to be fair, fans that make these unrealistic expectations for Metroid (or any game) are just as bad, or are bad in general as game developers are who set these unrealistic expectations for games and don't ever meet them. Like if the quality of the game is there, high quality and all, why do you care or worry about the sales?
Welcome to 2024 you must have just woken up from a coma. All jokes aside that's really how it seems to be these days... In damn near everything, people want there to be a clear number one best option. And if you arent that you're trash. Doesn't matter if your number two in the whole freaking universe. You're just the first loser
1M being bad or good is largely dependent on the budget of the game, and the budget will be allocated based on sales expectations. Be that a $100M budget game that's expected to sell at least 5 Million or a $1M budget game that only needs to sell 100k.
A million seller is considered bad ever since Western companies made Triple Arse games where 5 million units are needed to break even. But Metroid doesnt have a Triple Arse level of budget.
@@valygomu Yea but Nintendo really doesn't make money off of that, its free to download and no stuff like microtransactions or anything that can be purchased to boost sales for it. In order to download and play it you need a Nintendo Switch Online subscription service so they are basing on how many people downloaded it and how often people are playing it to see if anyone is interested in F-Zero.
Megaman hasn't been abandoned by Capcom, it simply lacks a champion within Capcom. While we had Megaman 11, with modest success, no director right now that we know of is willing to direct a new Megaman game. Large because of how big of an IP it actually is. It's one of their oldest and most iconic character and they are all afraid to fail to meet expectations.
@@arjanzweers6542 MM is not important anymore, for the makers of RE, DMC, and MH. Those MM11 numbers are not enough for them, because their standards became very different... and besides, they don't respect anything for their old legacy alone in first place. It's no coincidence that other old franchises were forgotten if they don't sell good (for them) like Street Fighter. And yeah, MM's truly been abandoned. You are just refusing to admit it, though strangely your own description of the situation shows a clear picture that it was abandoned.
In all honesty, who the heck cares! Why is this still a common issue when people talk about anything Metroid? Why has this (still) become a running joke for Metroid? The games/series don’t sell well blah blah blah. So what! You guys (If any of you are Metroid fans) ask for a new (or remake) Metroid game, we get it, it get high praises whether that be Metroid Dread, Samus Returns, or Prime Remastered, but everyone still b** and complains about the sales of the series. Do you even really care about Metroid? Do you want the series to have the same level of quality as a Mario, Zelda, or Xenoblade game? Keyword, “level of quality”. If you want Nintendo to do new Metroid games and them to sell well, BUY THE GAMES! Especially Prime 4 Beyond. Otherwise, Nintendo should just shelve the series for good this time.
@@gmcubed The franchises are divided by ranks, and the highest rank is owned by Mario, Zelda, SSB, etc. Metroid is a lower rank franchise, like Kirby and DK too. And there are even lower ranks, of literally or almost abandoned franchises like F Zero, Earthbound, etc. Those depend on SSB to stay visible by the general public, outside the bubble of the hardcore community.
The discussion matters because if the game is a sales failure it has high chances of disappearing. I mean, Nintendo sometimes doesn't even demand that a game is a failure to bury them or barely give them attention... so imagine when a game is truly a failure.
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
Resume: Because it still gets money from a different audience than mario and zelda. Having something getting profits from a big pool rather than nothing its still a smart move
Yeah I mean even just looking at myself I can understand it. I've drifted from Nintendo quite a bit over the years, but Metroid (and Zelda) always bring me back. I've bought systems for those franchises. So they're guaranteeing that someone like me will still buy into their systems by not neglecting that corner of their market share
@@aether388 I'm right there with you. When the Switch first got announced it didn't appeal to me very much, but even then I said that the second they announce a new Metroid game for it, I'll buy one. If Nintendo ever made it clear that they weren't going to do Metroid anymore, I'm not sure I'd buy their systems. Since they do make Metroid though, I end up buying the system and dozens of games for it over the life cycle.
It brings in a new audience and has tremendous potential to grow with the right marketing. Doom 2016 made the franchsie more popular than ever before and that's likely what Nintendo should strive to mimic in terms of sales since it's the closest game I think of to Metroid Prime.
I’ve always felt Nintendo see their games lineup like a restaurant menu. They have to have a Steak meal, a Chicken meal, a Fish meal, Vegetarian, something sweet in the variety of what they sell. There is something for almost everyone, and you won’t get bored if you have another flavour of game. Not many people buy the haddock, but it’s there to give balance to the offerings.
When you compare it to XBox, you can see XBox are catering to the people that like pizza 95% of the time and that’s why they’ve bought up all the other big pizza franchises.
3 million is massive for a 2 D game.
It's over $180 million in revenue. Hardly something to dismiss as insignificant. I think the perception of success in the video game industry is skewed by the unprecedented unpredictable juggernauts that sell 30+ million copies
New Super Mario Bros is a 2D game and the lazy Switch port of the Wii U NSMB is approaching 20 million sold, so…
@@jamesgames4553Right, Dread did a good job but it's not reaching 2D Mario sales.
It's how corporations think. We don't just need money. We need all the money. More more. Faster. Cut costs. Fire workers. It seems to get worse every year
@@greenwendal5056 Nintendo executives took pay cuts during the Wii U so they wouldn't have to lay off people
Metroid is so different from all the other Nintendo IPs, they would pretty much lose most of its fans as costumers. It's a big reason for me personally at least, to buy the new Switch.
Not all of them, sure, but every single Metroid fan where Metroid is the series that convinces them to buy a Nintendo console? Nintendo doesn't just make money off that copy of Metroid sold to them....but also off *every other game* they now buy on the console. Thats why diverse genre coverage is important. A new Metroid game might sell fewer copies than a new Mario game, but a disproportionate number of those copies will be to people newly sold on the ecosystem.
Thats why I skipped the Wii U. No reason to buy this hardware, which is one generation beyond.
And just to note, its definitely not just a Metroid thing. Nintendo has a lot of *relatively* low selling franchises that fit this plan. Xenoblade brings in jrpg fans; Fire Emblem brings in strategy rpg fans. Hell, they just released a new Famicom Detective Club game, which would target visual novel fans. All with the ability to hit audiences who might not be sold on your typical Mario and Zelda and Pokémon stuff.
I didn't buy a wii u because I made a rule that I would wait until a Metroid game was announced for it, which didn't happen. I bought the switch when prime 4 was announced. That ended up being an accidental lie on Nintendo's part for obvious reasons, but it made me buy the console.
I feel the same for Smash. I’d have bought a switch for Smash alone.
Man, I know that's just how it is, but aaaah is it frustrating how Metroid is not this huge franchise, man. As opposed to something like Pikmin, which is amazing don't get me wrong, it's just that Pikmin you kinda have to be there to fully understand what it is about, Metroid just has the makings of a huge IP like Zelda, Mario, Star Wars and such. I mean, the thing kickstarted a whole sub genre of videogames that are very very popular in their own space, still manages to set itself apart despite the explosion of many other metroidvanias, has sci-fi, lore, a badass protagonist that many people can gravitate towards to for multiple reason, cool designs, cool music, amazing environments, the works and yet Metroid still is relatively niche. Like aaaah, I don't get it. It has been doing alla that for more than 30 years now and it could truly be just as huge as the insanely popular Nintendo franchises. It makes me happy, however, knowing that the IP is growing. Metroid Dread, all things considered, has sold insanely well. Hopefully Prime 4 can get more people into Metroid.
I fully believe a new Metroid Prime game can do amazing numbers. The series just has not hit its escape velocity moment yet like some of the other franchises. I still remember when Animal Crossing was slept on for many years and Fire Emblem used to be barely known then exploded in popularity. The thing is you need a critical mass of releases before it spills over. Even some Zelda games sold similar numbers to Metroid games. But the constant barrage of quality Zelda games ensured the series grew exponentially in popularity. Metroid has had huge gaps in releases, not getting an N64 game for example.
@@graalcloud Yeah, true that. It's also to my understanding that Animal Crossing was kinda stagnating creatively until New Leaf came out and Awakening was just at the right place right time iirc as well as being a thoughtfully crafted experience. We've been eating good with Prime Remastered and Dread, and even Samus Returns before that, so at least right now things are going consistent. Hopefully they can keep that going on the Switch 2 with more Metroid games after Prime 4 and that they don't skip whatever comes after the Switch 2
I'm this day and age people are tired of "badass" female protagonists. Metroid is the same the same to them as as anything
@@HoboWithAShotgun That's definitely nothing to do with it. There isn't anything woke about Metroid.
@@graalcloud if I had never played Metroid before, I would assume it's absolutely woke. So would anyone reasonably.
Prime 4 is most likely gonna sell 4-5 million due to it being a launch window title for the Switch 2, benefiting from many years of exposure on the system. Almost all of the 15 best selling Switch games came out in the first 3 years of the console's life, the sooner it comes out the better. Unfortunately, Prime 4 is Nintendo's most expensive game by far and those 4-5 million will only help it break even, so the game will regardless end up being a financial loss in the end. At least it will signal to Nintendo that Metroid games can push solid numbers if they don't scrap development after 2 years and dial back the budget a little.
It can be another Zelda with new games with new powers and mechanics. The so far compelling but also minimalist / environmental storytelling and atmosphere are the most important. It's possible to even change genres, be open world, linear, dialogue heavy, etc. as long as it does it works.
They'll recoup some of those cost by making prime5 re-using tools, assets and methods of prime4. We saw Nintendo do this with high budget games before like in the Zelda series (Ocarina/Majora, Breath/Tears). In some ways we can also see Prime and Prime2 like that.
@ABSsponds I wouldnt play a metroid game of an different genre tbh. But heres an interesting idea, what if they gave a huge budget to make a metroid prime game with a great storymode, but this time went all in on making an actually good multiplayer mode as well. Metroid prime 2s multiplayer was terrible. This could blow metroid and make it an actually popular franchise
There are known launch titles for switch 2? Where did you hear this?
Bet it sells more if they do Ads like Prime 1 and manage to nail (what is hopefully) a Prime Hunters-style multiplayer mode but given a proper budget and the "right stuff" to make it popular.
Nintendo treats their core audience with respect. THE RESPECT THAT WE DESERVE.
At the bare minimum, prime 4 is a demonstration of the absolute maximum the switch hardware can run. People may not buy it as much as Mario kart or animal crossing, but it proves the switch's range.
Not quite.
It runs at 60fps, so from that point alone the game could look better, if you're only talking visuals. Do they _need_ to double frametime, just to get more out of it? Not at all.
Especially since Prime is plain and simply a 60fps franchise, they should never worsen that, only improve it! =D
@Kniffel101 are you saying that prime 4 should run at 120fps? Framerate isn't something I think about as long as it's consistent
@@BatPotatoes
If Switch 2 supports it, I'd be happy if it did, yeah.
That'd be more important to me than graphical improvements with diminishing returns.
But if it doesn't support it, by all means, they can improve visuals as long as 60fps is the target and it doesn't dip.
Animal Crossing is for the Birds, Yo. 👷♀️
It'd be like if all movie studios only made super hero and popular family properties. Yes they are the most profitable right now but there's still sizable markets for specific genres such as horror, sci-fi & fantasy, musical, etc. I think Metroid is potentially reaching an all time high in influence over the past five years, with numerous indie inspired Metroidvanias and Dread winning the game award for best action game of 2021, even for the smaller franchise I think the industry is taking notice. Not to mention that Prime 4's development team at Retro has hired staff from all over the industry, crossing borders of company/console.
Nintendo still makes money off Metroid
The games don't even sell bad. I get annoyed with these people (especially executives) who think something doesn't sell well because they compare it to their top selling franchise. But Metroid games still sell 1.5-4 million. Yeah, it's not Pokemon or Mario numbers. But they still make plenty of profit. And like the video said, it's more important to have a presence in the market. These other companies that just dump all their IPs except the top 3 selling ones (Konami, Square, Disney, etc) eventually burn the big three. And have to go buy new IPs. You wouldn't have to buy new IPs if you had kept supporting the ones you had...
A lot of executives like to pretend that they can predict what the audience wants, but that's really not the case (especially these days with it taking so long to develop new games). It's smart of Nintendo to keep a variety of games alive on their platform as audience tastes change - Otherwise they wouldn't have success stories like Fire Emblem: Three Houses. And Nintendo's hardware being modest keeps development costs lower than they would be otherwise.
Seeing adult gamers on youtube giggling like schoolgirls over nonsense games like Mario kart, Super Smash Bros and Pokémon, whilst at the same time _Never_ having even played a Metroid game just makes me lose faith in humanity.
I mean dread and prime remastered sold extremely well.
If they make a Metroid pinball for Switch I'll buy it. I'll buy anything Metroid.
What about a Metroid butt plug? In shape of Samus arm cannon.
0:37 My brother always rebukes me when I am making that sad face.
Because Nintendo has the ability and the will to not forget its franchises, at least not all of them, and even after their poor sales, they continue to insist on releasing games like Fzero, Metroid or Starfox. This has made them a 130-year-old company.🐐🐐🐐🐐
@@armandomarin371 There is a serious problem of favoritism inside Nintendo. I mean, surely differences of treatment are expected since some franchises are indeed much more famous than others, but the problem is when those smaller ones are too affected negatively and are denied a chance to improve and do better.
So it becomes a tragic dynamic as the industry and technology moves on, the other Nintendo franchises move on and evolve, and the abandoned franchises tend to look gradually less attractive to the company because they will demand a lot of effort to be reworked to modern gameplay standards. To begin with they have the stigma of being the "failures" and are probably not well respected in the company.
Westerners trying to figure out Nintendos motivations are hilarious, did you just start paying attention to them once switch was successful?
It's not about sales, maximizing shareholder value, cornering the market or any financial reasons. On the dev side, they just make new games when they have new ideas. It's driven by creatives. They don't make new FZeros because they don't know where to take the series creatively. Typically, the hardware of each generation was developed when Miyamoto had a new idea for Mario that their current hardware couldn't account for.
Why do they keep making Metroid? I don't know, but looking at the companies philosophy on all of their in house games, you have to come to the conclusion that there is some sort of creative idea that these new Metroids are trying. We won't know what Prime 4 is attempting until we get our hands on it.
Look at the comments, it's unfathomable that Nintendo is driven by anything but financial decisions. Our entire focus in the West is the money, and outside of Valve, early Blizzard, Supergiant and a select few others, it has never worked out for us creatively (those companies were obviously driven by creatives). There are money making franchises in the West, but they are rarely era defining, and mostly sold off of marketing.
Because it doesn't as nearly as much to make a Metroid game, and NIntendo doesn't spend hundreds of millions to make a game in any case.
Their Triple A titles don't cost what a Rockstar or an Activision (now Microsoft) does.
Nintendo is a weird case: They'll either keep making games they know that won't sell a lot but still people will love and buy (like Metroid series) or they'll refuse making new games for popular franchise despite the demand they still have (like F-Zero series).
Right now, they're doing basically everything with F-Zero EXCEPT making a brand new game.
@@Vetusomaru There are franchises that don't sell like crazy but they are respected in the company, like Metroid. And there are franchises that also don't sell like crazy but they have less respect, like F Zero and Star Fox. The company has little motivation to rework those franchises to reach the potential of others, believing they have little "Nintendo quality" to offer nowadays. That's the tragedy of those franchises.
are you calling F-Zero a popular franchise? LOL
Somebody should tell this to Capcom about Mega Man as they let one of their biggest flaship series rot until they figure out they don't necessarily need to make a huge, expensive, risky AAA title. Fans of Capcom are more often than not fans of various series of theirs. When they blatantly ignore one of their supposedly important fanbases, they are not doing themselves a favor. All the time and resources that go into those action figures and model kits, crossovers that nobody asked for, or other arguable wastes of money could be going into another light, but well packed Mega Man game. For crying out loud, even a sequel to their classic series was the highest selling title in the series. It wouldn't even really lose money I'd bet. Fans are starving.
@@TayoEXE MM is very easy to make in all aspects, and it works in a way that it doesn't have real perspectives of ambitious growth. Like it wasn't meant to evolve like Zelda, from 2d to 3d with massive scale lately. There are whole subseries that aren't platformers, but they are something else, the original game is meant to stick to the formula.
Still Capcom has zero interest, probably because they are too used to the sales of RE, DMC and MH and won't respect a new project that does so little.
Also, and this is important in my opinion: MM works in such a basic way that it can't be abused and milked with dlc and micro transactions, unlike Street Fighter. It's probably no coincidence that SF is the only veteran franchise that Capcom returned to invest seriously... once they realized they can sell characters and costumes for years. So SF can earn a lot more after the launch. But MM doesn't give room to be milked that way.
And this observation seems to make sense when we remember that Capcom made MM X Dive, the mobile game... After all, a mobile game can earn more than a regular MM game.
So that's the tragedy of the franchise. Capcom became too ambitious and greedy because of the success of RE, DMC and MH.
3 million isn't "bad sales" it's low sales when compared to other games. You think all authors who aren't the biggest best sellers should just stop? No area can have everyone be at the top.
It depends on your budget.
3 million copies was a big success in during the GameCube era. But somewhere during the PS3 and 360 era, games at the AAA level started to require so much money to make that 3 million copies became a one way ticket to bankruptcy.
That's one of, if not the main reason why Nintendo decided to stay one generation behind in terms of processing power with the Wii.
Unfortunately a lot of game publishers think exactly that way. Games being moderately successful isn’t good enough for them.
@@jme6036 Nintendo isn't a typical publisher I'd say.
@@jme6036 Square Enix for example. Which is funny how the CEO was adamant of NFTs despite the fact those were obviously failures, but a Final Fantasy game that has sold well and praised like XVI but wasn't the best selling game they ever made so it was marked a failure.
Conspiracy theory time, maybe because Yoshi-P actually has spoken up against NFTs so the CEO must have bias against him, but cannot rid of Yoshi-P because XIV Online is legit a money maker, and in Japanese work laws you must have a great case to fire anybody on any level - it is why you never heard of Japanese companies laying off their employees unless it was the overseas beanches.
@@ManU-kf7bt But Nintendo behaves "typically" as many other publishers at least in the sense of giving radically less attention and budget to smaller franchises than Mario, Zelda, SSB, etc. There is a clear border separating the higher ranks and lower ranks, that Metroid belongs to. And that's what this whole debate is actually based on. Metroid, Earthbound, F Zero, Star Fox, DK, Kirby, etc. Some of those are abandoned, others are almost dead, others are just very inconsistent.
I still don't quite get it. If Metroid exists to hold space in the market for more mature games, doesn't Nintendo still eventually need to make more games like that to capitalize on that particular market share? From the corporate perspective, what is the point of holding the space if you never actually profit much off it? Not saying he's wrong or that I don't like Metroid, I'm just not quite seeing the financial strategy here, am I missing something?
Making video games is hard man. Making a video game on par with Super Metroid without compromising quality or pissing the fans off is REALLY hard. Let the chefs do the cooking.
Maybe if you didn't drink so much coffee, then you'd be able to think more clearly, and you'd see...
Stop chasing waterfalls, my son.
Prime remake and Dread sold far more millions than enough to justify continuing the series.
Before I even watch I was always under the impression that Nintendo keeps the lesser selling titles around for variety. Why would I buy a Nintendo platform if all they are offering is just Mario, Pokemon and Zelda because they sell the most?
Pokemon is WHACK sauce 💂♀️
@@That-Ninja it is but people keep buying it more than higher quality games... and twice at that with their dual game model.
@@SiriusPharos okay. I like seagulls. I think they're wicked cool. Sometimes about them, y'know...
Metroid rewards intuition, and problem solving If I could describe it solely. Id say Metroid is akin to one “huge 24 hour dungeon”. It’s a hard stop gap for many that they may become easily frustrated from not being able to solve it. The issue is that “the popularity” cant or wont give the series a try and learn intuitively, how to go through a metroidvania and beat it. It is certainly Nintendo's pioneered, mature audience genre, and they know it so, there will always be 3m dedicated, cognitively focused fans, that will show up for big metroid releases :).
Edit: Just wanted to share my love for the franchise runs deep-Nintendo inexplicably taught me how to be investigative, at the ripe young age of six, beating Metroid Prime 2: Echoes on the Gamecube two years later at 8 in 09.
To infinity and -- Beyond! 🎉
I agree. Super Metroid was my first metroidvania in general. I initially still thought it was a great game but nothing more. I then played zero mission and fusion and I happened to really fall in love with those games, probably because they were just a bit easier to get into. Those games really improved my judgment when it comes to these types of games. I went back and played super and it immediately became one of my favorite games.
Zelda was kind of similar before Breath of the Wild, but now that's got such a big audience it seems like they can't allow the player to get stuck on puzzles nearly as much. Even Echoes of Wisdom, which brings back traditional dungeons, is really easy and allows puzzles to be solved in a number of different ways. It's too bad because now we just can't expect to get that expertly designed guided experience that old Zelda use to have from that series anymore. We have to get that type of game from Metroid now, so hopefully the series doesn't get **too** popular that they make changes to it
@@athoremagreed its sad to see that we wont be getting the same familiarity in zelda soon. Oldschool zelda will always hold a special place. ❤️
@@smellybondoapeinsightful truly 👏
P.S. Love the Yujijo PFP 👊
@@athorem The main difference is that Metroid gets new games way less often, Zelda had a single formula for more than 10 games, it's an anomaly that a series can have that many titles all with the same blueprint while keeping a consistently high level of critical success, it needed to change things sooner or later to stay relevant.
How well did Super Metroid sell compared to other SNES games of its day?
Its one of the best games of all time.
So Metroid 3 was the 34th most sold SNES game. 1,42 million copies.
Source: this article on english wikipedia... List_of_best-selling_Super_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_video_games
@cjeelde 34th most sold game? There's a lot to live up to on that system, so I can live with that. I don't agree with it being the 34th best game on SNES, but I can live with it.
@@itchyisvegeta The good news is that Metroid Fusion is the 23th most sold game on the GBA and Metroid Prime was the 6th best selling Gamecube game.
The Metroid series in general has sold 21.6 million. Thats about the same number as Yakuza, Dynasty Warriors, and Prince of Persia.
@orangeslash1667 I actually did not like Prime on GameCube. Bought it back in the day brand new, played it for 4 hours, and couldn't get past the controls. Great game, just wasn't for me.
The Switch version on the other hand was exactly for me, and I was stupid excited when they announced that with traditional twin stick GPS controls.
@@itchyisvegeta oh
Bad sales is kind of overdoing it, Lackluster sales would have been a more appropriate term for Metroids sales history, Metroid may not be a system seller, but excluding Federation Force and Prime Pinball its never been a flop.
Other M ☝️
@That-Ninja Ah actually Other M manged to atleast break a million in sales so it wasn't that much a flop.
@@robertkenny1201 somehow that makes even more of a flop from Tina's perspective. Tina is my pet parrot. The parrot talks and she didn't like that game. She likes Metroid 2 for game boy pocket the best... She always requested to have that opening theme to be played on the stereo so she can dance to it...
@@That-Ninja your parrot is great
@@LiamNajor she likes CRACKERS 🍘
For the love of ART
@@Ledout-c3y They needed to invest more on art and revive abandoned franchises that are perfectly fine and have potential to do well today.
Maybe cause fans give up when they have to wait 19 years for a sequel
And dread is the best game for the switch outside of breath of the wild
If Nintendo stopped making Metroid and especially Xenoblade games, I would stop buying their consoles. So they sell hardware and lots more software by continuing to support my favorite IPs, even if they "underperform." Don't get me wrong; I still enjoy 3D Mario and Zelda. But not enough to continue buying consoles.
I think of it like the gaming industry/ landscape is a lot like an ecosystem. You will have dominant franchises at the top but also smaller franchises and one off games that play an equally important role in maintaining a healthy industry.
Exactly! Another smart person.
Metroid? Bad sales? Since when?
Most games average 1 million. Metroid Prime 1 was heavily inflated due to Gamecube bundles.
Metroid Dread is the only game that broke this streak by selling 3 million.
Since literally forever
Bad sales for the standards of big Nintendo franchises, the ones who are rewarded with unconditional love and attention. Not Metroid.
Metroid games are like a generational Nintendo flex. They'll take an underpowered console and make some of the best art design around. DOOM Eternal ripped off Prime 2's aesthetics if you know where to look, and Halo 4 also had a certain Metroid Prime sheen to it (which makes sense considering Prime staff helped make it).
Dead space (the original at least) uses the EXACT same map system. It even has the same glitch as Prime where the map accidentally gets stuck upside down if you rotate it a certain way. So there's another game that has inspirations from Prime.
There's a reason why there's a whole game genre named Metroivania after all. That franchise is one these grandfather who stay cool with time and still influence younger one.
Doom 2016 definitely took a lot of inspiration from Metroid Prime and it was a big part of the reason I enjoyed the game tbh
@@GBDupree I remember when everyone was freaking out about Dead Space when it came out, I tried it and it literally just felt like a ripoff of Resident Evil 4 mixed with a rip-off of Metroid Prime. Not in a bad way but you could see the inspiration from those two games, which both happen to be Gamecube masterpieces. It's funny as fuck to me that the "mature" gaming audience missed out of those games because Gamecube was widely and incorrectly smeared as a kiddy console.
It still makes money
Not the money that convinces Nintendo to take it seriously and get the deserved constant attention
F-Zero...
There are some games in a worse state, sure
I'm more surprised that metroid doesn't sell well. It's their best ip. Mario and zelda are cool, but metroid has always kept me coming back and replaying the games. I've played the metroid trilogy god knows how many times. I've played metroid dread around 65 times. Mario and zelda don't do that for me. Well, there's the xenoblade chronicles series but I haven't replayed those nearly as much due to how long it takes to beat them and do everything in them.
For you, it's their best Ip. For me, it is Zelda. you played Dread 65time. I can' even count how many time I beat OoT since 1998 or play more than 1k hour in the 2 lastest games. But for them, Mario is at the top because the plumber bring ton of profit in many different way that others franchise can bring. The biggest wall Metroid has, is about its sci-fi aspect which is not appealing to everyone. The genre itself is pretty much niche in all entertainment industry. Then there's the gameplay genre which may not be appealing to parent with their kids who are one big part of Nintendo playerbase (not the biggest which is the 16-30yo; those with free time and money).
Metroid is the best they have imo. I love how the game doesn't lose its identity unlike Zelda which has completely changed fundamentally to satisfy the open world fans.
@@brandonthompson548 Believe it or not, a game like Breath of the Wild is the type of Zelda game Nintendo has been wanting to make since the N64 era, it simply wasn't possible before due to the technological constraints.
@@Leee275 I believe it. I just prefer the traditional method of zelda vs the new one. Metroid is still very much the same as it always been and I love it for that.
@@brandonthompson548 It's a matter of taste. Managing an old franchise with a direction oriented to the past (formulaic) or to the future.
Some old franchises that started in 2d work in a way that it's hard to be reimagined in 3d, but others have a better potential for that transition... and in that case it's probably a better idea to change them to 3d. That shows an intention of being open to technology advances and improve the franchise with those new tools that are very different from what existed when the games were created. And that is just an extreme example, as the 2d to 3d transition was the most intense of the whole industry, but the same goes for each new console bringing more powerful technology. It's probably better not to stay stuck in an old formula only for the sake of nostalgia.
If Metroid was released on the Xbox and PlayStation it would have sold way better. I honestly believe Metroid doesn’t match the taste of the general audience that buys Nintendo consoles. The same can be said for games like Astro Bot or Raychet and Clank, they would sell better on a Nintendo platform. At least in my opinion.
@@COFFEEBREAKRACING Yeah, Metroid is a different vibe from the typical Nintendo product. But it's not that much mature either, so it has a place to occupy in that Nintendo ecosystem.
It has a hardcore gameplay model, extremely out of the box when it debuted, and was meant for older people, especially since Super Metroid, that only made it more mature and hardcore. That versatility is important and I even think Nintendo could be investing harder on that.
Franchises' Bad Sales ? Metroid Prime is and was the best selling games Besides Zelda .
The genre and gameplay of Metroid Prime is unique. It's nintendo First Person Shooter franchise.
Yeah no, Metroid Prime is definitely not a "First Person Shooter", as Nintendo stated a million times since 2001 but you people can't read.
@@Abner_Aharoni First Person adventure?
@@Abner_AharoniWhatever Nintendo states is irrelevant. Metroid Prime falls de facto under the FPS umbrella by virtue of being in first person and shooting being the main combat mechanic.
@@Raul_27 bro do your fucking research. There's a huge line between "First Person Shooters" and Metroid Prime..
Also super fucking amateur for calling Metroid that..
I feel like metroid can easily make more sales if Nintendo would focus on the marketing a little, maybe add a multiplayer mode like they did to metroid prime 2
Novody really cares about secondary multiplayer modes anymore, it's either a robust multiplayer mode you will play for hundreds of hours or nobody cares.
@oscarzxn4067 that's what I meant, a fleshed out multiplayer mode with deeper gameplay and mechanics. I guess I should've mentioned metroid prime hunters, not metroid prime 2
@@9a3eedi
See that chair in the corner? Go sit in it. 🪑
I believe it will change with metroid prime 4 , metroid prime remasterd sold well .
No it wont. 5-6 mill maybe for Prime 4. DK is the same, never a huge seller, and yet DKCTF didn't change anything. No Retro Studio's game sells astronomically, say as Platinum Games' games. Nothing wrong with lower sales. Not every game is for everyone. Let niche fanbases enjoy their niche series.
@@ItApproaches5 to 6 million would be huge for metroid. Best selling prime game is the first with somewhere around 2 million if I remember correctly
@@ItApproaches DK dosen't sell? Your kidding right
DKC - 3rd best selling SNES game 13mil
DKC2 - best selling SNES game that wasen't a pack in title 6.1 mil
DK64 - 7th best selling SNES game 5.2 mil.
DKCR - A collective 9.47 mil sold between Wii and 3DS.
That's not even including surprise hits like Diddy kong racing and the land series which do surprisingly well for being smaller side piece titles.
You really don't wanna underestimate DK's selling power his releases don't think he's ever dropped below the top 30 of best sellers of a console including the time he was locked behind the DK bongos and being heavily neglected.
@mrjack3855 Dread is the best selling with other 3 million sold.
@@relinquishh yeah, so I can see prime 4 doing 3 to 4 million at least.
I remember buying GC games brand new for like 20 bucks brand new. I think that with Nintendo's more aggressive pricing policy they are still probably averaging 50$ at every Dread sale. Prime Remastered started lower but I still don't see it on any meaningful sale.
Nintendo generally does not put their games on sale except in rare cases and then not by very much. They believe it devalues the games and their franchises and that lowering the price would coincide with a decrease in the public perception of their games' quality, which Nintendo has historically been extremely protective of since their very entry into the console market. (Hence the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" they required for any game Nintendo licensed for the NES to earn to demonstrate a basic level of quality for games on the NES during the time when a complete lack of quality control on other systems lead to the video game bust of the 80s since everybody lost faith in the medium.)
@@nullvoyent It's important to note as well that Nintendo - regarding sales of physical games - give full authority to retailers to put the games on whatever markdown they desire. You used to see this with Wal-Mart locations having Nintendo games cheaper than other retailers for a very long time (no idea if this is still the case, I haven't noticed it on Wal-Mart's digital storefront and haven't stepped foot in one in forever), and this persists with outlets like Costco (admittedly for only the most popular Nintendo releases). The retailers though don't utilize this often because they are still buying their stock from Nintendo at higher prices so they are less incentivized to drop the price because they spent so much on the stock.
It is important to know that Nintendo's belief in this regard is true, in so far that it actually does have a positive effect on sales and their profit, and this is easily observable if you compare how high their profit margins are compared to their competitors. Sony's early sales tactics do a significant amount to devalue their games such that they no longer make profit on each sale of the game, which is a massive problem as the price of developing AAA games has increased to horrific levels. Microsoft has basically cannibalized all their game sales for Game Pass.
I believe by marketing metroid as nintendos resident evil it will work well. Resident evil is just a metroidvania in a mansion. Metroid can have some stalker enemies like Sa-X follow the player the full game
I just love how Metroid games is always pushing the limits of each hardware its on. Even the worst one Other M, or as I like to call it "Other baby".
As I understand it, Metroid isn't really big at Japan?
Never was
@@azogdefiler25 okay, then we have to force them to like it... They will LEARN to like it, by whatever means necessary 🪑
Might be an unpopular opinion but I think a different company could do a lot more with the franchise than nintendo does. I think Square Enix.
SEGA is reviving a bunch of its old franchises because they want to make movies out of them. I bet they're wishing they had been keeping all of their old franchises relevant like Nintendo, because most of those SEGA franchises really fell off the map and probably aren't as big of a draw for a movie. But Metroid likely would be a big draw for a movie despite its humble sales.
Probably not exactly what the guy in the interview meant, but it shows that keeping franchises alive is important. You cannot make big plays like creating a video game movie with something you don't have.
Nintendo has a number of abandoned franchises, and others that get little to no attention, and others that are fairly inconsistent in releases. And some franchises are like cult classics... Metroid, Earthbound, etc. But that status only belongs to few cases. It's incorrect to make it sound (at least as it appeared to me) like it's the general case in Nintendo. Though it's true that even the smallest Nintendo franchises did better and lasted longer than those classic Sega franchises.
Secondly, the preservation of the image of smaller franchises has a lot to do with SSB, instead of Nintendo's own management. And Sega doesn't have something like SSB to help their games.
They have always been experimental with both of their hardware and software, keeping niche series alive is a way to show they are always willing to provide more than one way of interacting with the medium, which is what has always made them successful.
I am pretty sure Metroid dread was a financial hit And won a game award Because Metroid six is Definitely in the Works
Not the sufficient "hit" that matters to Nintendo so that they change their minds and start giving the franchise more attention and resources. The fact is that nothing has changed, the game is still the Nintendo niche.
Since when 1M plus sales are bad? is not really that popular but the quality over quantity indeed
Thank you! 100% agreed. An to be fair, fans that make these unrealistic expectations for Metroid (or any game) are just as bad, or are bad in general as game developers are who set these unrealistic expectations for games and don't ever meet them. Like if the quality of the game is there, high quality and all, why do you care or worry about the sales?
Welcome to 2024 you must have just woken up from a coma. All jokes aside that's really how it seems to be these days... In damn near everything, people want there to be a clear number one best option. And if you arent that you're trash. Doesn't matter if your number two in the whole freaking universe. You're just the first loser
1M being bad or good is largely dependent on the budget of the game, and the budget will be allocated based on sales expectations. Be that a $100M budget game that's expected to sell at least 5 Million or a $1M budget game that only needs to sell 100k.
A million seller is considered bad ever since Western companies made Triple Arse games where 5 million units are needed to break even.
But Metroid doesnt have a Triple Arse level of budget.
Since 15 years
I wonder the same about F-Zero, but there haven't been any games since F-Zero GX.
I mean there was 99
@@valygomu Yea but Nintendo really doesn't make money off of that, its free to download and no stuff like microtransactions or anything that can be purchased to boost sales for it. In order to download and play it you need a Nintendo Switch Online subscription service so they are basing on how many people downloaded it and how often people are playing it to see if anyone is interested in F-Zero.
@@eljuli1003 Nintendo completely lost faith in the game
@@valygomuyou sound like a Verpert.
@That-Ninja what does that mean ?
and yet capcom abandoned megaman, so sad
giving away presence for no reason
Capcom doesn't own a platform, Nintendo does, so the analogy works.
Megaman hasn't been abandoned by Capcom, it simply lacks a champion within Capcom. While we had Megaman 11, with modest success, no director right now that we know of is willing to direct a new Megaman game. Large because of how big of an IP it actually is. It's one of their oldest and most iconic character and they are all afraid to fail to meet expectations.
@@arjanzweers6542 MM is not important anymore, for the makers of RE, DMC, and MH. Those MM11 numbers are not enough for them, because their standards became very different... and besides, they don't respect anything for their old legacy alone in first place. It's no coincidence that other old franchises were forgotten if they don't sell good (for them) like Street Fighter.
And yeah, MM's truly been abandoned. You are just refusing to admit it, though strangely your own description of the situation shows a clear picture that it was abandoned.
@@carlosaugusto9821 Capcom make a clear intention when they said games that not meet their expectation (less 1 million) probably wont get a sequal..
Only junkies play Mega Man 👩🔬
Take Fire Emblem. It sold but never a lot and now it sells very well,
I got a funny little feeling that prime 4 is going to be cray cray to the crazy crazy stuff 😶
In all honesty, who the heck cares! Why is this still a common issue when people talk about anything Metroid? Why has this (still) become a running joke for Metroid? The games/series don’t sell well blah blah blah. So what! You guys (If any of you are Metroid fans) ask for a new (or remake) Metroid game, we get it, it get high praises whether that be Metroid Dread, Samus Returns, or Prime Remastered, but everyone still b** and complains about the sales of the series.
Do you even really care about Metroid? Do you want the series to have the same level of quality as a Mario, Zelda, or Xenoblade game? Keyword, “level of quality”. If you want Nintendo to do new Metroid games and them to sell well, BUY THE GAMES! Especially Prime 4 Beyond. Otherwise, Nintendo should just shelve the series for good this time.
It's not an issue, more of a curiosity, since there are other franchises in the same boat but are getting a lot less love by nintendo, like F-Zero.
@@gmcubed The franchises are divided by ranks, and the highest rank is owned by Mario, Zelda, SSB, etc. Metroid is a lower rank franchise, like Kirby and DK too. And there are even lower ranks, of literally or almost abandoned franchises like F Zero, Earthbound, etc. Those depend on SSB to stay visible by the general public, outside the bubble of the hardcore community.
The discussion matters because if the game is a sales failure it has high chances of disappearing. I mean, Nintendo sometimes doesn't even demand that a game is a failure to bury them or barely give them attention... so imagine when a game is truly a failure.
Old man what makes you qualified to talk about Nintendo games.
Please read the description.