Email: Why your still wrong on Smash

“Why does everyone accept Sakurai’s statement that Street Fighter fans are ‘niche’? He’s flat out wrong.”

 

Let’s look at the data

 

http://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/business/salesdata.html Capcom sales data

http://www.gamespot.com/news/street-fighter-2-still-capcoms-best-seller-6234836 Street Fighter 2 sales

 

Street Fighter sold 34,000,000 units over 77 games. That means, on average, a game sold 441,558 units. Selling help a million for a game isn’t very mainstream and there are a plethora of titles that sell better. Let’s not forget that the majority of these sales are Street Fighter 2 (which is estimated around 6 million). Remove the 5 versions of Street Fighter 2 and average sales are 368,000. For comparison, Xenoblade Chronicle’s US sales are higher than the average worldwide sales for Street Fighter games. That sounds pretty niche to me.

 

http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=xenoblade

 

Let’s look at Smash Brother’s sales.

 

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/250193/super-smash-bros-a-sales-history/ – Smash series sales. VGChartz estimates (Don’t like ’em. Go look at my last e-mail. Gonna make you do some research).

 

Super Smash Brothers has sold 23 million copies over 3 games. This is an average of 7,880,000 million copies per game. This is a far cry larger than Street Fighter’s 368,000 and higher than the best selling Street Fighter game which was 6 million. That looks niche to me.

 

Street Fighter 2 was a popular game. No one is denying that, but it came out over 20 years ago.  Is Street Fighter main stream now? Not really. When we remove Street Fighter 2 from the series, we see a big difference in performance. Are fighting games main stream? No. Is Smash Brothers main stream? Looks like it for them sales numbers. Smash’s sales are 67.64% of SF’s sales when Street Fighter has made 25 times as many games with an 8 year head start. At the same time, what point do you have to back up the fact that Sakurai is “flat out wrong.” You’re the one who said sales=quality, so Smash Brothers is clearly a higher quality product (even SF’s best selling game sold less than Melee and Brawl).

 

“Consider the storyline of Brawl. Was that necessary? What does any of that have to do with this type of game? The ‘story’ of Brawl is not that far off from the creative anarchy that hatched Metroid: Other M.”

 

“PN: In Brawl, there was a big focus on the story, including the Subspace Emissary: the first mode History ‘series. Will you offer something similar in the new Smash Bros. ? Sakurai: Well, we do not plan to include a fashion similar story this time.”

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.p-nintendo.com%2Farticles%2Finterviews%2Fmasahiro-sakurai-nous-parle-de-ssbb-235210 (Note this is a translation from french so don’t take it too literally).

 

You said back when that you didn’t know anything about Smash. That’s fine, but now, all of a sudden, your a damn expert on the series and tell every one they don’t understand Sakurai. The problem here is reality is different that what you think. When someone else comes in with other facts, you dismiss it and talk about how Miyamoto is ruining Mario dodging the situation entirely. 

 

I love you Malstrom, but you need to stop saying retarded shit when it comes to Smash. You can think what you want, but look at the numbers and do some dang research. At least don’t ignore the numbers this time. Hopefully my next e-mail will be a little more positive. I enjoy what you write, but Christ, step back and look at it for a minute.I appreciate your gusto and attention to detail. I suspect you are being animated that my criticism laser is being narrowed more and more on Sakurai where people aren’t used to him being criticized yet. I remember when I first criticized Miyamoto, Aonuma, or Sakamoto and it felt like the Gates of Hell were unleashed on me. I figure if they wish to present themselves as public figures and if everyone wants to praise them all day, they are also safe for criticism. Sakurai is in this camp as well.

When Sakurai was saying that Street Fighter was niche, he wasn’t really referring to Street Fighter. He was referring to the genre that Street Fighter spawned, of how the current fighting game genre was born.

Street Fighter 2 was a mass market phenomenon. Street Fighter 2 probably was responsible for selling more SNES systems than Super Mario World. The game was just massive.

“But that was then. If you take Street Fighter 2 out, the numbers go down significantly.”

And this is true. Street Fighter 2’s decline in sales number doesn’t mean a decline in quality. It could mean a rise in competition. Did Street Fighter 2 spawn many competitors as they all ate at the same market pie? Big time.

Add up all the fighting games, and you’ll find Smash isn’t even close. The fighting genre was so massive that not only did Street Fighter series thrive (and gee whiz did it come up with so many different versions of the same game), so did other games. Mortal Kombat was massively popular.

“That was then. Today, the sales numbers say that people don’t like fighting games.”

Then why do fighting games keep appearing in the best selling list for NPD? Street Fighter 4 did well. Mortal Kombat 9 did well. And Injustice is currently on the Best Selling List. And for a genre that is supposed to be ‘niche’, why did Microsoft use Killer Instinct to showcase their console?

The fighting genre is so popular that Street Fighter got a movie and Mortal Kombat got two movies. These are not niche games. These are still very healthy franchises that are older than Smash Brothers. If you want to compare them to Wii Sports, sure, they’d be niche. But then again, every video game is niche compared to Wii Sports. A ‘niche’ is a Japanese bullet-hell shmup. A best selling game may not be ‘mainstream’ in the Wii Sports sense, but it certainly isn’t niche.

Sakurai is a smart guy, so why did he say something so dumb? Is Sakurai dumb? I don’t think so.

I think there are two reasons. The first is ego-narrative. I think Sakurai suffers from the Nintendo Kool-Aid as much as the other Nintendo developers do. The other reason is that Sakurai may be residing in that bizzaro reality called ‘Nintendo World’. In ‘Nintendo World’, it is believed that the fighting genre is ‘niche’ and Smash is the true mainstream fighting game.

But if you look at the numbers, which I do, you see fighting games still selling very well. In the same way, racing games still sell well. This doesn’t take anything away from Mario Kart, but the director of Mario Kart isn’t calling other racing games a ‘niche’ is he? If he did, people would call him out on it. So why can’t we call out Sakurai for saying fighting games are a niche when the sales numbers say otherwise?

If you want a good example of a game series that was popular and turned into a niche due to idiotic thinking of the director, that series would be Mega Man. Mega Man was practically a phenomenon on the NES and did extremely well on the SNES. It even has its own cartoon show.

It was Mega Man 9’s emphasis on being a ‘hardcore game’ that essentially destroyed the franchise. After the initial good round of sales when the game came out, Mega Man 9 sales plummeted. When Mega Man 10 was made, there was no talk of making sales from the team to Capcom. It was about ‘creative visions’ which means the team members wanting to design their own robot master. That selfishness destroyed the series, not the Capcom overlords.

Nintendo gets its money from software sales. The best way to get software sales is to go Blue Ocean and not stay in the Red Ocean. Sakurai should say he doesn’t want to overlay Smash with fighting game competitors because it will decrease sales. Instead, he says the fighting genre is ‘niche’ which is bullcrap.

Sakurai cannot compete in the fighting market. This is why Smash has to be *different*.

One thing Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat have proven is that they can keep a solid core of fans over a long period of time despite many, many games. Smash has only had three games which is not much. I say Brawl’s better sales are due to more of the Wii’s install base than the game itself. My guess is that the series will decline from here out. We’ll find out with Smash 4.