Topic: The modern games media...

...can't handle more than 3-4 big games at any one time.

I've seen a lot of comments (let's face it - complaints!) about the announced launch lineup for Switch. Nintendo hasn't announced enough games for many which is strange because we can all be 90%+ certain about some of the games that weren't announced that are coming in the first 12 months (Smash Bros, Pokemon and Animal Crossing for a start). But there's a definite logic to their approach.

It starts with this fact: unlike the old print based media 15 years ago the online games media can't really cope with 6-12 big games being announced at once. The reason for this is simple - the biggest games drain the life out of the smallest ones so stories about, say, Bomberman R, get very quickly beaten in the race for clicks by games like Zelda. Traditional print media wouldn't know this or be able to respond to it if they could - they were so fixed by timescale and format.

The online media knows and can instantly respond. Which they do by burying articles on the games that get fewer clicks and writing more and more and more about the most popular games.

You already see this with the Switch. Zelda - although we've seen it in-depth numerous times and it's largely a known quantity by this point - is still generating more articles than any other Switch game. Mario Odyssey - although we've only seen a teaser trailer and it's still 9 months+ away - is seeing far more articles than the relatively imminent (and clearly very interesting) ARMs.

There's a fixed number of games journalists so if Nintendo had also announced (for example) Smash Bros Switch last Friday then how many of the articles written ARMs or Snipperclips giving a brief synopsis of what those games are would have been cut or buried in favour of a mass of articles speculating about new characters in Smash? Would anyone have paid any notice to the Ultra Street Fighter reveal?

Which leads to another point: the mainstream media rarely pays any attention to video games and big unveiling events like Friday are one of those rare times when they do.

This is why Nintendo announced a mix of quirky "blue ocean" plays like 1,2 Switch and Snipperclips and "retro throwbacks" like Street Fighter and Super Bomberman alongside the games they actually expect to make their money on.

A 40 year old family man who last played a game 15 years ago might not care about where the industry has gone, might never visit a video games website but "Street Fighter and Super Bomberman? YES - video games are back!". If they'd stacked the launch reveal that target audience would never hear those names over stuff that's great but require a lot of previous buy in to understand (like Metroid).

It's easy to reach the people who care about a new Metroid (they're all here and eagerly watching for news) but it's really hard to reach people who are lapsed or more occasional players. So the Nintendo approach makes sense.

...

None of which is to say that I think Nintendo got everything right (the price is too expensive at launch and it'll hurt the console if it stays high). Just that I think it's important to understand their marketing approach and be a little patient. The big games reveals will come (and there will be many this year) but I think Nintendo is wise to pick their moments and avoid suffocating their own projects.

If anything Friday shows that Nintendo understands a lot more about how to market video games to a mass market today than journalists and twitter users give them credit for. Even if they don't get everything right.

Good post, and plenty to think about. I think it's true that the modern system in which information is not only presented, but also shared, creates a situation of extremes, as you say. Even if a website attempted to be more balanced in their coverage, it would inevitably be the 'big game' articles that get shared more, creating much the same sort of effect.

The problem is, with everyone knocking their opinions into everyone else's so constantly, you quickly start to develop widespread narratives that are difficult to untangle. Either everything is awesome or everything is awful, and usually the latter.

So there's a high price for holding things back as well.