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[Thurible]

New Mario whens

I think most people believe it might be a while till a new mainline Mario comes out because the team that usually works on them did DK Bananaza.

 

[NanaMiku]

Because look at what happened with MP4, they announced it way too early with just the logo, then changed development and took forever to release. BotW took too long to come out after officially announcing it. Just show and release a game within a one or two year window.

Yes, this is why. Nintendo has been burned several times for announcing games too early. Don't forget Tokyo Mirage Sessions too lol

 

[Chris FOM]

I'll try to respond point by point, because you are making some fair arguments — but you're also leaning on a few rhetorical shortcuts that don't really hold up.

First, I'm not ignoring sales, nor am I claiming sales "don't matter." What I'm pushing back against is the idea that sales alone are sufficient proof that a communication strategy is optimal. Sales are an outcome, not a diagnostic. Strong sales can coexist with missed opportunities in messaging, positioning, and expectation-setting. Marketing analysis routinely looks at multiple metrics beyond raw sales: brand momentum, consumer confidence, platform perception, attach-rate expectations, preorder velocity, and even volatility in sentiment between announcement cycles. None of those invalidate sales — they contextualize them. Saying "sales are good, therefore the strategy is beyond critique" shuts down analysis rather than answering it.

[snipped for brevity]

So to be clear: I'm not arguing that Nintendo's strategy is failing, nor that early announcements magically guarantee higher sales. I'm arguing that success does not make a strategy immune to critique, and that there is a credible case that a slightly longer, clearer announcement horizon could strengthen confidence and momentum without incurring the risks you're worried about. Disagreeing with that is fine — but framing the discussion as if sales numbers alone settle the question is where I think your argument overreaches.

I'm so heavily focused on sales because they're the ultimate goal. Everything else you listed: brand momentum, consumer confidence, etc. matter only to the degree they ultimately translate into sales, and not one inch further. You'll never see any of those other elements listed in a financial briefing because they can't keep a business open. It's not hard to think of games who had massive hype over their announcements that then didn't sell at levels anywhere near what the prerelease hype would have suggested (Dead Island immediately comes to mind, as does Sony's "E3 of Dreams" trio of Last Guardian, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Shenmue 3, but there are countless others). The ultimate measure of success for any business is profits and loss, and for a video game company those come down to software sales. The other items you listed are purely supporting factors to help drive those sales with no inherent value of their own.

Beyond that, you've taken for granted that Nintendo has tended towards extreme secrecy with a 6-12 month announcement window. But taking a broader view of the wider entertainment world it's gaming that is the massive outlier. For movies or TV shows the typical window for marketing is much shorter and basically in line with what Nintendo's doing. On the 2+ years early end at most there might be an announcement at ComicCon, but it's generally little more than a title reveal and maybe a logo, and aimed at a narrow audience (and do we really need Nintendo to tell us they're working on the next Mario or Zelda or Animal Crossing or…?). The real marketing for a major tentpole is more like a teaser poster 9-12 months before release, a teaser trailer about 6 months out, a final trailer at 2 months, then TV advertising starting 4-6 weeks in advance of release. Smaller movies get even less, on a more compressed timeframe. Things like the RDJ reveal for Avengers Doomsday are extremely uncommon and was done only because the MCU was in a tailspin and their previous plans for Avengers moves had fallen apart (in other words they were forced to announce super early as a salvage play, and it was a sign of weakness and not strength that they did so, as every bit of commentary on the announcement rightly noted). So it's not even a given that their announcement window is even particularly short except in the anomaly that are video games, at which point it's worth question if the gaming marketing cycle is the one that's got it wrong.

On top of that there's plenty of risk with an early announcement that you've glossed over. Some get canceled and never see the light of day. Some see delays, at times huge ones. Some get overhauled and change massively during development (in extreme cases, like Halo, the game as initially revealed shares little more than a title with what's finally released). By waiting until that 6-12 month window you avoid the worst of that. Cancellation or a reboot is highly unlikely. The scope is well defined and unlikely to change. Delays, if they happen, are likely going to be over smaller issues and on a level of weeks or maybe a couple months, not a year or more. The likelihood of delivering on the promise is much higher, and the risk of faceplanting much smaller.

Basically, your want Nintendo to announce games earlier. There's nothing wrong with that. However, if you want to go beyond purely personal preference, you need to show that their current strategy isn't working, or at least doesn't work as well as their competitors'. Your question as posted:

If Nintendo (1) relies heavily on first-party software to define its platforms, (2) competes in an industry where mindshare is increasingly fragmented, and (3) consistently compresses announcement windows even when development timelines are stable, then questioning whether that strategy leaves value on the table is reasonable.

Is 100% a legitimate one. Point 1 is unquestioned and unquestionable. While the Switch and Switch 2 have better 3rd party support than any Nintendo system since the SNES, there can be no doubt it's still Nintendo's first party output that's the biggest factor in their success. But while point 2 is also true, I don't think you can make a credible argument that Nintendo's current strategy actually means they don't have mindshare. Does anybody that keeps any interest on console gaming feel like they don't know who Nintendo is or what they're up to? And while point 3 is therefore a fair question, you haven't actually offered any evidence that Nintendo's strategy is leaving value on the table. That's the conclusion I keep harping on you for assuming: that earlier announcements are synonymous with better mindshare, hype, and therefore generate increased hype and sales. But you haven't shown either half of that to be true: either that earlier announcements actually do generate more hype or that Nintendo's approach is costing them mindshare or sales.

The hard facts on the ground are that ever since the Switch launched in early 2017, nearly 9 years ago now, Nintendo has been by far the most successful company in all of video games. By any objective metric you care to use they're running rings around all the companies you claim are doing a better job of messaging. So if you want to claim Nintendo should be acting more like their less successful competition, then the burden of proof is entirely on you to show how that will actually help them.

 

[tr1p1ex]

Who is going to buy a Nintendo console now who wasn't before because Nintendo announces that a Super Mario game is coming in 2029?

 

[Midway-AGNC-]

I'm so heavily focused on sales because they're the ultimate goal. Everything else you listed: brand momentum, consumer confidence, etc. matter only to the degree they ultimately translate into sales, and not one inch further. You'll never see any of those other elements listed in a financial briefing because they can't keep a business open. It's not hard to think of games who had massive hype over their announcements that then didn't sell at levels anywhere near what the prerelease hype would have suggested (Dead Island immediately comes to mind, as does Sony's "E3 of Dreams" trio of Last Guardian, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Shenmue 3, but there are countless others). The ultimate measure of success for any business is profits and loss, and for a video game company those come down to software sales. The other items you listed are purely supporting factors to help drive those sales with no inherent value of their own.

Beyond that, you've taken for granted that Nintendo has tended towards extreme secrecy with a 6-12 month announcement window. But taking a broader view of the wider entertainment world it's gaming that is the massive outlier. For movies or TV shows the typical window for marketing is much shorter and basically in line with what Nintendo's doing. On the 2+ years early end at most there might be an announcement at ComicCon, but it's generally little more than a title reveal and maybe a logo, and aimed at a narrow audience (and do we really need Nintendo to tell us they're working on the next Mario or Zelda or Animal Crossing or…?). The real marketing for a major tentpole is more like a teaser poster 9-12 months before release, a teaser trailer about 6 months out, a final trailer at 2 months, then TV advertising starting 4-6 weeks in advance of release. Smaller movies get even less, on a more compressed timeframe. Things like the RDJ reveal for Avengers Doomsday are extremely uncommon and was done only because the MCU was in a tailspin and their previous plans for Avengers moves had fallen apart (in other words they were forced to announce super early as a salvage play, and it was a sign of weakness and not strength that they did so, as every bit of commentary on the announcement rightly noted). So it's not even a given that their announcement window is even particularly short except in the anomaly that are video games, at which point it's worth question if the gaming marketing cycle is the one that's got it wrong.

On top of that there's plenty of risk with an early announcement that you've glossed over. Some get canceled and never see the light of day. Some see delays, at times huge ones. Some get overhauled and change massively during development (in extreme cases, like Halo, the game as initially revealed shares little more than a title with what's finally released). By waiting until that 6-12 month window you avoid the worst of that. Cancellation or a reboot is highly unlikely. The scope is well defined and unlikely to change. Delays, if they happen, are likely going to be over smaller issues and on a level of weeks or maybe a couple months, not a year or more. The likelihood of delivering on the promise is much higher, and the risk of faceplanting much smaller.

Basically, your want Nintendo to announce games earlier. There's nothing wrong with that. However, if you want to go beyond purely personal preference, you need to show that their current strategy isn't working, or at least doesn't work as well as their competitors'. Your question as posted:

I think this is where your argument quietly shifts from analysis to post-hoc justification, and that's the core issue.

Yes, sales and profits are the ultimate business outcomes — no one is disputing that. But saying that everything else "matters only insofar as it turns into sales, and not one inch further" doesn't actually negate their analytical value. It just restates the obvious. Diagnostic indicators are not alternative goals; they're tools for understanding how and why sales happen, how resilient that performance is, and what trade-offs are being made. Companies absolutely track these internally even if they don't headline them in earnings calls, because financial briefings report outcomes, not operating signals. Confusing "not publicly disclosed" with "doesn't matter" is a category error.

More importantly, your examples (Dead Island, early Sony E3 reveals, etc.) argue against hype divorced from execution, not against longer or clearer announcement horizons per se. No one here is advocating vaporware, CGI-only teases, or multi-year silence followed by delays. That's a false equivalence. The question isn't "early vs late," but where the optimal point lies on the information curve, and whether Nintendo's extreme compression is the only rational answer. Pointing to failures at one extreme doesn't validate the other as optimal by default.

The movie/TV comparison also doesn't really hold up under closer inspection. Film marketing is shorter because films are single-purchase, non-platform products with no ecosystem lock-in, no attach-rate dynamics, and no long-term roadmap implications for consumers. Games — especially platform-driven ones like Nintendo's — operate under fundamentally different demand mechanics. Players aren't just buying a movie ticket; they're making hardware decisions, planning future purchases, managing expectations for a platform's lifespan, and allocating attention in a crowded release calendar. Treating those markets as directly comparable glosses over structural differences that matter.

On risk: you're right that earlier announcements increase exposure to delays, reworks, and cancellations. That's a real cost. But acknowledging risk isn't the same as proving that the current strategy minimizes total downside or maximizes upside. Risk management is about balancing probabilities and payoffs, not simply minimizing embarrassment. Avoiding all early communication reduces one class of risk while potentially increasing others — uncertainty gaps, speculative narratives filling the vacuum, and volatile sentiment cycles. Whether that trade-off is optimal is precisely what's being debated.

Which brings me to your final claim, and this is the crux of the disagreement:
the idea that unless a strategy produces negative results, criticism "doesn't count."

That standard would make meaningful critique impossible. By that logic, no dominant firm, no market leader, and no highly profitable strategy could ever be questioned until after failure occurs. That's not rigorous analysis; it's outcome-bias. Strategy evaluation isn't a courtroom where only damages justify inquiry. It's a forward-looking discipline concerned with efficiency, resilience, opportunity cost, and alternative equilibria — including cases where something is working, but plausibly not as well as it could.

So yes, Nintendo's strategy works. That's not in dispute.
What is in dispute is the unexamined leap from "it works" to "it cannot be improved, and any critique requires proof of failure." That leap isn't analytical rigor — it's an artificially high bar that conveniently insulates the strategy from scrutiny. Disagreeing on where the optimal balance lies is fair. Declaring the discussion settled unless sales drop is not.

Is 100% a legitimate one. Point 1 is unquestioned and unquestionable. While the Switch and Switch 2 have better 3rd party support than any Nintendo system since the SNES, there can be no doubt it's still Nintendo's first party output that's the biggest factor in their success. But while point 2 is also true, I don't think you can make a credible argument that Nintendo's current strategy actually means they don't have mindshare. Does anybody that keeps any interest on console gaming feel like they don't know who Nintendo is or what they're up to? And while point 3 is therefore a fair question, you haven't actually offered any evidence that Nintendo's strategy is leaving value on the table. That's the conclusion I keep harping on you for assuming: that earlier announcements are synonymous with better mindshare, hype, and therefore generate increased hype and sales. But you haven't shown either half of that to be true: either that earlier announcements actually do generate more hype or that Nintendo's approach is costing them mindshare or sales.

The hard facts on the ground are that ever since the Switch launched in early 2017, nearly 9 years ago now, Nintendo has been by far the most successful company in all of video games. By any objective metric you care to use they're running rings around all the companies you claim are doing a better job of messaging. So if you want to claim Nintendo should be acting more like their less successful competition, then the burden of proof is entirely on you to show how that will actually help them.

I think this is where we're talking past each other, because you keep reframing my position into a stronger claim than I'm actually making, and then dismissing it by pointing to Nintendo's dominance.

First, on mindshare: I'm not arguing that Nintendo "lacks" mindshare in some absolute sense, or that people don't know who Nintendo is or what it does. That's a strawman. Mindshare isn't binary. It's not "exists" vs "doesn't exist." It's about distribution, persistence, and stability of attention over time, especially between announcement cycles. A company can dominate the market and still experience volatility, speculation spirals, and uncertainty during content droughts — which is exactly what we repeatedly see in Nintendo's own community discourse. Pointing out that Nintendo is famous doesn't address that narrower, more specific claim.

Second, on evidence: I have given examples, but you're dismissing them because they don't come packaged as a direct sales delta, which is an unreasonable bar. I cited recurring patterns of speculation, anxiety, and narrative vacuum during long gaps; I pointed to competitors using longer roadmaps to stabilize expectations; and I contrasted that with Nintendo's self-imposed silence even when projects are clearly in late, stable development. None of that requires proving a hypothetical alternate-sales universe to be analytically valid. You're effectively saying that unless I can show "sales would have been higher by X%," the critique doesn't count. That's not analysis — that's using sales as a shield to invalidate any argument that isn't purely retrospective.

Third, on "earlier announcements = better hype": that's not a premise I've asserted. I've been explicit that early announcements don't automatically create better hype or higher sales. What I'm arguing is conditional and probabilistic: that in some cases, a slightly longer, clearer announcement horizon can reduce uncertainty, smooth sentiment, and maintain momentum — without the extreme risks associated with multi-year teases. You keep responding as if I'm advocating a wholesale shift toward Sony-style E3 vaporware, which I'm not.

Finally, the "burden of proof" framing is doing a lot of work for you. You're treating Nintendo's success as if it falsifies the possibility of improvement, and positioning competitors' weaker performance as proof that any deviation must be harmful. That's outcome bias. Success tells us that Nintendo's strategy clears the bar; it doesn't tell us it's at the local or global optimum. Strategic critique doesn't require showing that the incumbent is failing — only that there is a credible case that alternative parameters could yield marginal gains or reduced volatility.

So to be clear: I'm not saying Nintendo should "act like less successful competitors." I'm saying that pointing to Nintendo's sales leadership does not, by itself, refute the claim that their communication strategy may be leaving some value on the table. Repeating "they sell more than everyone else" doesn't engage with that claim — it sidesteps it.

Who is going to buy a Nintendo console now who wasn't before because Nintendo announces that a Super Mario game is coming in 2029?

That framing is overly simplistic. Not everyone buys a Nintendo console for Mario, and hardware purchases are forward-looking decisions based on the overall first-party pipeline, not a single flagship IP. Even high-level confirmation of other franchises or new IPs can reduce uncertainty for buyers who are on the fence. Treating the audience as if Mario alone defines purchase intent ignores how diverse Nintendo's own ecosystem and motivations actually are.

 

[Evil Calvin]

Take away old ports and it's pretty barren.

 

[robor]

Wouldn't be so bad if they had decided to announce a new, fully-fledged, AAA F-Zero game instead of a sequal to a certain racing game nobody asked for.

 

[Midway-AGNC-]

I feel you,you definitely backed your discussion well and multiple times too. I actually have noticed that some of the nintendo hardcores on here are deadly serious about nintendo and an unwelcome suggestion or wrong word about the company then it's taken real personal.

It's actually cringe....

Exactly, and what's striking is how people end up doing precisely what was just described: repeating the same stock arguments and weak, rehearsed justifications almost like gospel or doctrine, and doubling down no matter how many times those points are addressed. It stops being a discussion and turns into ritualized defense, where the goal isn't to engage with the argument, but to reaffirm loyalty to a narrative that must not be questioned.

 

[Chris FOM]

I think this is where your argument quietly shifts from analysis to post-hoc justification, and that's the core issue.

Yes, sales and profits are the ultimate business outcomes — no one is disputing that. But saying that everything else "matters only insofar as it turns into sales, and not one inch further" doesn't actually negate their analytical value. It just restates the obvious. Diagnostic indicators are not alternative goals; they're tools for understanding how and why sales happen, how resilient that performance is, and what trade-offs are being made. Companies absolutely track these internally even if they don't headline them in earnings calls, because financial briefings report outcomes, not operating signals. Confusing "not publicly disclosed" with "doesn't matter" is a category error.

That's a lot of words to argue with me while not disagreeing with anything I actually wrote, and in fact conceding all of it. Yes the other elements that occur before sales are useful diagnostic indicators. But what are they diagnosing? Forecasted future sales. That's it. They have absolute zero inherent value of their own, so treating strategies that maximize them as inherently valuable in and of themselves is missing the point. Beyond that, I can tell you that Nintendo tracks them closely, and there's been no reason given to think that Nintendo's internal tracking shows this is a problem, nor are there third party customer surveys that show Nintendo is struggling either.

More importantly, your examples (Dead Island, early Sony E3 reveals, etc.) argue against hype divorced from execution, not against longer or clearer announcement horizons per se. No one here is advocating vaporware, CGI-only teases, or multi-year silence followed by delays. That's a false equivalence. The question isn't "early vs late," but where the optimal point lies on the information curve, and whether Nintendo's extreme compression is the only rational answer. Pointing to failures at one extreme doesn't validate the other as optimal by default.

No, the failure of alternative approaches doesn't invalidate Nintendo's own strategy, but sustained success says that Nintendo's strategy, even if not the perfect ideal, is clearly working very well and continuing to work. Or to put it another way, you're looking for the optimal point on the information curve while dismissing there may not be a single optimal point. Nintendo's approach (which I do not think could usually be categorized as "extreme compression" although there are exceptions) doesn't have to be the only rational answer so long as it's a rational answer. Not only that but you're brushing off problems caused by early announcements as merely execution errors, but to some extent misplaced expectations are unavoidable, one that Nintendo's later announcements sidestep entirely.

The movie/TV comparison also doesn't really hold up under closer inspection. Film marketing is shorter because films are single-purchase, non-platform products with no ecosystem lock-in, no attach-rate dynamics, and no long-term roadmap implications for consumers. Games — especially platform-driven ones like Nintendo's — operate under fundamentally different demand mechanics. Players aren't just buying a movie ticket; they're making hardware decisions, planning future purchases, managing expectations for a platform's lifespan, and allocating attention in a crowded release calendar. Treating those markets as directly comparable glosses over structural differences that matter.

While there are differences, I'm not sure they're nearly as big as you make them out to be. In addition Apple meets every criterion you listed and makes Nintendo look downright chatty, coming far closer to extreme secrecy than Nintendo and they don't see to have a communication problem either. If you want to claim that Apple is simply a special case then it's not hard to say the same then applies to Nintendo.

First, on mindshare: I'm not arguing that Nintendo "lacks" mindshare in some absolute sense, or that people don't know who Nintendo is or what it does. That's a strawman. Mindshare isn't binary. It's not "exists" vs "doesn't exist." It's about distribution, persistence, and stability of attention over time, especially between announcement cycles. A company can dominate the market and still experience volatility, speculation spirals, and uncertainty during content droughts — which is exactly what we repeatedly see in Nintendo's own community discourse. Pointing out that Nintendo is famous doesn't address that narrower, more specific claim.

The issue with this is you haven't actually shown that Nintendo is having issues with "distribution, persistence, and stability of attention over time," or that they're actually experiencing "volatility, speculation spirals, and uncertainty during content droughts." You've claimed that it's a problem, but not one of your posts have actually provided examples of this beyond your own opinion.

Second, on evidence: I have given examples, but you're dismissing them because they don't come packaged as a direct sales delta, which is an unreasonable bar. I cited recurring patterns of speculation, anxiety, and narrative vacuum during long gaps; I pointed to competitors using longer roadmaps to stabilize expectations; and I contrasted that with Nintendo's self-imposed silence even when projects are clearly in late, stable development. None of that requires proving a hypothetical alternate-sales universe to be analytically valid. You're effectively saying that unless I can show "sales would have been higher by X%," the critique doesn't count. That's not analysis — that's using sales as a shield to invalidate any argument that isn't purely retrospective.

No, you haven't given any examples at all. I've read the entire thread and not once have you given a single example or outside source of "recurring patterns of speculation, anxiety, and narrative vacuum during long gaps." You've simply asserted that they're happening but haven't provided sources to back that claim up. I'm not asking for you to show the math of what percentage sales would increase, I'm asking you to show a single link that shows Nintendo actually has the communications problem you say they do.

Which brings me to your final claim, and this is the crux of the disagreement:
the idea that unless a strategy produces negative results, criticism "doesn't count."

That standard would make meaningful critique impossible. By that logic, no dominant firm, no market leader, and no highly profitable strategy could ever be questioned until after failure occurs. That's not rigorous analysis; it's outcome-bias. Strategy evaluation isn't a courtroom where only damages justify inquiry. It's a forward-looking discipline concerned with efficiency, resilience, opportunity cost, and alternative equilibria — including cases where something is working, but plausibly not as well as it could.

So yes, Nintendo's strategy works. That's not in dispute.
What is in dispute is the unexamined leap from "it works" to "it cannot be improved, and any critique requires proof of failure." That leap isn't analytical rigor — it's an artificially high bar that conveniently insulates the strategy from scrutiny. Disagreeing on where the optimal balance lies is fair. Declaring the discussion settled unless sales drop is not.

Finally, the "burden of proof" framing is doing a lot of work for you. You're treating Nintendo's success as if it falsifies the possibility of improvement, and positioning competitors' weaker performance as proof that any deviation must be harmful. That's outcome bias. Success tells us that Nintendo's strategy clears the bar; it doesn't tell us it's at the local or global optimum. Strategic critique doesn't require showing that the incumbent is failing — only that there is a credible case that alternative parameters could yield marginal gains or reduced volatility.

I brought these two together because they're basically making the same point, so rather than making an already too-long post longer I tried to compress it some.

I agree with you that you can't critique a strategy before you see failure. That said, the more successful a company is the more evidence you need to bring to the table that they're messing up. In Nintendo's case they've not only been highly successful in absolute terms but also industry-leading relative to everyone else for nearly 9 straight years (the longest such streak since the PS1-PS2 era). After the catastrophic Wii U Nintendo rebounded with the Switch to launch the second-most successful console of all time (still with a chance to become the most successful), then navigated the generational shift to the Switch 2 (and if you think generational shifts are easy then look at the N64, GameCube, Wii U, 3DS, PS3, PS Vita, XB1, and Xbox Series). While no human-led organization will ever be perfect, if Nintendo was making a serious systemic mistake then that kind of sustained success is very hard to explain.