Topic: Why do Nintendo's new Switch IPs get called "failures"?

It's a trend I've noticed a lot with Nintendo's new concepts on Switch, whenever it doesn't do Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, Smash Ultimate, or hell, Wii Sports numbers, it automatically is deemed a failure, even before official numbers and expectations come out. 1-2 Switch? Failure (sold 2.69 million), ARMS? Failure (Sold 2 million), Nintendo Labo? Failure (Sold over a million with sales increases last holiday, and just had a new kit released with decent sales)

The only exceptions to this rule are Snipperclips, which was eShop only in its original run, and Sushi Striker, a game that actually failed. 2 million is not a failure, at all. You may not like these games, but they have an audience, and are some of the Switch's best selling titles. Do people honestly think Nintendo expects everything to catch on like Splatoon or have the same audience as it? Or is it because these IP are reminiscent of the filthy Wii era, and thus, need to hold them to the impossible Wii Sports standard to justify their argument? Also if ARMS and Labo were such failures, why does Nintendo keep promoting them regularly?

Because they do.

If they were someone other than Nintendo moving 2mill for a new IP would be pretty good. But this is Nintendo. Even for a new IP. People are going to be comparing the sales of Arms on the Switch to Splatoon on the Wii U. It's night and day.

I didn't know any of those games were deemed "failures." Are we believing the internet again, or is this official wording from Nintendo?

@TheMisterManGuy
I don't think 1-2-Switch, ARMS and other Minor Nintendo IP were a Failure.
I think it just peoples still couldn't embrace the new things.
Some peoples were still salty with 1-2-Switch due to very quirky and silly way to play. Also, very few peoples have interest with ARMS due to Boxing genre, not a typical mainstream sports.
The low sales for those games indicate that still a lot of peoples tend to get along well with mainstream things rather than embrace new things that still completely strange for them. It was a Xenophobia syndrome, fear to accept something totally new and different.

Btw, they were NOT a Failure. They were Hidden gems for certain peoples who could embrace new things. ARMS was my Day One Switch game since i saw the first teaser of ARMS on 12 January 2017 because i have very strong interest with Boxing. 1-2-Switch was instant buy for me due to very quirky and unusual way to play. Mainstream gamers will not even consider those unusual games, but for me as Anti-Mainstream gamer will definitely consider those hidden gems.

@skywake But it's not the Internet's job to set sales expectations, it's Nintendo's. If a game meets or exceeds their own expectations, then its a success. If Nintendo thinks 2 million is good enough for ARMS, than that's what counts, not the unrealistic standards than fanboys on the internet set.

@TheMisterManGuy
I don't disagree but when some of their other new games have been as big as Splatoon people are going to make that comparison. I'm sure Nintendo is pretty happy with the sales of these titles, no doubt about it. But there's no denying the gap between those releases in terms of sales performance. So "fanboys on the internet", which is who we're talking about here, are going to rightly make that comparison.

I'll put it this way, in terms of sales performance there are the tiers for Nintendo franchises:
S: Animal Crossing, Mario Kart, Smash Bros, New SMB, Pokemon
A: Mario, Zelda, Splatoon, Mario Maker, DKC
B: ARMS, Xenoblade, Pikmin, Metroid, Paper Mario, Mario Party
C: Kirby, Yoshi, Mario Tennis/Golf, LABO, StarFox, F-Zero

When people say "failure" for Nintendo as a new IP? What they actually mean is that it's Yoshi-tier

Of course, there's a large gap in sales. But what some people don't get is that no competent business would expect the same number of sales for every title. A game's sales expectations should be made on a game-by-game basis, not a company wide standard. A lot of games don't need tens of millions of copies sold to be successful, but if they pull a good 1-2 million copies, then it should be enough for them. It all depends on the budget and target audience for the game. Each game should go in with a different mission, and Nintendo understands this. That's why sales expectations are set individually rather than broadly.

When people tried to use "failures" it's more or less Trolling. You can't compare different Nintendo games and say they are failures. They must be judge on their own there are plenty of PC and PS and Xbox failures but no one seems to remember that. It's just that Switch is going full bore and those others are left behind so what do you do but make and call the TOP DOG "failures" to boost your own consoles.

As long as a game turns a profit I believe Nintendo doesn't really care whether outside sources label that game as successful or not. How often do you see financial reports from Nintendo mentioning how one release or another underperformed sales wise? I can't remember a report that did.

It's just Nintendo experimenting, you can't expect them to catch lightning in a bottle everytime. I'm sure they pretty much always make a profit, but that's not their goal. You can say the "fan-boys" are overestimating, but Nintendo also tries these things in hope of having another huge success (like Splatoon). So when it's not the break-through product they might have hoped it would be, that can be considered a failure, since they could've spent their time on more valuable products. Just because something doesn't bomb (and makes them directly lose money), doesn't mean it's not a failure in their eyes.

Splatoon actually wasn't intended to be the runaway success it ended up being. In fact, even Nintendo was surprised at how fast the game caught on. So while, yes they do hope for the best with certain releases, many times they're fine with modest success so long as they can build off that. And usually Nintendo does call out their under-performing games like they did with Wii Music and Super Mario Run. That said, I never saw them say that ARMS or Labo under-performed at all. In fact, I remember Yabuki saying that ARMS actually ended up doing better than they expected.

I don't think it's just a matter of how well it sold. There's also the matter of how much potential it has for future development and how unique it is relative to the rest of Nintendo IPs.

A couple of examples:
1) Yoshi games sell slightly more than Xenoblade games. But I bet Xenoblade is considered the more important franchise within Nintendo. It's more unique and it's more technically ambitious so has a certain marketing benefit when showing off the console's capabilities. JRPGs, being heavily story-driven, are also infinitely iterate-able.

2) Even if Splatoon had sold slightly less than Mario Maker on the Wii U, I bet it would be considered the bigger success, because it has a lot more potential for future development. Splatoon will probably become a permanent franchise where we'll be playing Splatoon 5 in a decade time. Mario Maker is much less likely to be. They're going to hit diminishing returns on that very quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if there was no Mario Maker 3 (except maybe ports for future consoles)

People who think Arms failed in terms of sales should be ignored, probably by all of society.

There are no shortage of games that I'm confident are better than Arms that sold worse than Arms, and some of those were also considered successful, so its absurd to consider Arms a failure.

I mostly blame the "choose one of two options", good or bad, black and white, anti-nuance parts of society. Arms did much worse than Nintendo's most successful games, technically, so CLEARLY it must be a failure if it wasn't a success on that level. I mean the reality is, some people have dumb opinions that are too dumb to be worth anyone's time. I'm kind of annoyed that I decided to even waste any time or brain power to thinking about what people blatantly wrong about some game I don't care about think. Literally anything would be a better use of time, practically, so I suggest you also don't care and use your time wisely.

I used to have this little argument with people all the time regarding ARMS and 1-2-Switch. I think it's mostly a question of how these games are perceived by hardcore gamers such as the people who read Nintendo-oriented websites. But Nintendi's audience reaches far beyond these forums...

With ARMS I think it's totally Nintendo's fault for launching it right between MK8C and Splatoon 2. Everybody bought those games and talked about them nonstop, so the chatter about ARMS was completely drowned out. It was selling, and people were playing, but perception-wise it looked like it didn't exist. It actually did really well by most standards, enough so that I'm pretty confident there will be an ARMS 2 at some point, but it didn't really have the pulse of the crowd.

Which is okay, to be honest. Some games are just bigger than others. It's a thing. And fighting games are rarely mega-sellers. Even legendary fighting games don't reach BOTW numbers without spanning multiple consoles.

And 1-2-Switch just isn't the cool game to talk about with your gaming buddies. I'm sure it's a great party game, but party games don't get gamer buzz. But I'm sure there are now millions of kids who think 1-2-Switch is part of the Nintendo legacy, and will remember it years from now. It's like Bowling with the Wii. It's a thing millions of people have done. It's part of the brand now.

Capcom's goal for Street Fighter V, a well established fighting franchise, was 2 million units. ARMS, a newcomer with no established backing or fanbase, managed to hit that. I think we can say it's a success.

Interestingly, you didn't mention Astral Chain, which despite being a new IP, everyone is assuming is a huge success for once. Probably because it's designed to appeal to the kind of people who frequent these forums.