post any random Mario thought on your mind

Mario Kart Tour's two button input shows that Super Mario Run could have been a normal platformer instead of an autorunner.
 
Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars also sold abysmally.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1094074661292384256

I'm left wondering, what gives? Neither BiS Bowser Jr.'s Journey nor Tipping Stars are bad games.

One is a remake of a beloved title that sold truckloads on the original system. I doubt the casual 3DS playerbase made an informed decision not to buy the remake (considering the DS version can already be played on 3DS). Something else must have been the reason. Decreased interest in the console? Oversaturation of similar games on one system?

The other game is an above average puzzle platformer that was and still is sold for relatively cheap (20 €/$). Previous games in the MvDK series didn't perform nearly as bad as this one, except for Minis on the Move which, yes, I agree is kinda boring. Also, it was released in 2015, long before the 3DS was cut support.
 
It was a largely unneeded remake of a game you could still play on the 3ds already. It got the same amount of advertisement as any other 3ds game even.

The reason the BiS remake failed is simply put, no one cared.
 
It's true that the remake was very much useless but, again, did the average soccer mom, grandma, or arts college student really know that? "Hey, I should buy this new Mario game for my kid/my partner/myself! Oh, wait a minute, it's actually a remake of Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story for the Nintendo DS™️, which can already be played on the newer hardware! I shall thus find and purchase the original, or buy the new Switch thing altogether!"

Point is, most people who purchase Nintendo games aren't nerds like us to be aware or informed of a video game's history. If the feverish sales of the hundreds of game ports released on the Switch in the past 4 years have told us anything, it's that Nintendo re-releases are seen as "this new Zelda/Mario Kart game". Or, did this cynical narrative suddenly change with the 3DS?

I'd say people just stopped caring for the 3DS in general and completely moved on the Switch by that point. Which begs the question, why was Nintendo so incompetent that they didn't release the remake on the newer system and instead let the studio that made it, just, die?
 
I second the notion of, why did Nintendo let Alphadream die? If I were Nintendo, I would have funded them and give them extra staff to make an excellent game knowing Alphadream's potential.
 
BabyRosalinaFan2014 said:
It's true that the remake was very much useless but, again, did the average soccer mom, grandma, or arts college student really know that? "Hey, I should buy this new Mario game for my kid/my partner/myself! Oh, wait a minute, it's actually a remake of Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story for the Nintendo DS™️, which can already be played on the newer hardware! I shall thus find and purchase the original, or buy the new Switch thing altogether!"

Point is, most people who purchase Nintendo games aren't nerds like us to be aware or informed of a video game's history. If the feverish sales of the hundreds of game ports released on the Switch in the past 4 years have told us anything, it's that Nintendo re-releases are seen as "this new Zelda/Mario Kart game". Or, did this cynical narrative suddenly change with the 3DS?

I'd say people just stopped caring for the 3DS in general and completely moved on the Switch by that point. Which begs the question, why was Nintendo so incompetent that they didn't release the remake on the newer system and instead let the studio that made it, just, die?
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Considering how most parents nowadays just get the video games their kids (who are much more knowledgeable about such things) tell them to, I doubt thats much of a factor.

And it wasn't Nintendo's incompetence that caused AD to die, it was that they were completely unable to to adapt to more powerful hardware. They were struggling with the 3DS the entire time and had to get another company to help them with the 3D stuff for pretty much every game they made on the system.

People always talk about alphadream's "potential" but that wasn't as much you'd think. They specialized in smaller sprite based games, they were comparable to a small indie dev team nowadays except that they had a contract with a major first party company.

On top of all that, I think that a lot of people just weren't interested in a Mario rpg anymore except the diehards, the series sales had been in a steady decline with each new installment on the 3DS.

Combine all that with the company being in major debt it's no surprise why they ultimately went under.

And don't say Nintendo should have bailed them out, thats not how businesses work, they'd sooner just let the name go under then re-hire the people under a different name without the previous debt.
 
BabyRosalinaFan2014 said:
Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars also sold abysmally.
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Those numbers are misleading, because those are just for the retail download card in Japan. Being a digital-only game (which the Japanese sales tracker mentioned doesn,t track, at least with no great accuracy) most of its sales would obviously come from downloads.

I don,t think it did fantastically (considering there have been no buy-to-play MvDK games since then) but it could also just be the series was long getting old in the tooth by that point.

Mcmadness said:
And don't say Nintendo should have bailed them out, thats not how businesses work, they'd sooner just let the name go under then re-hire the people under a different name without the previous debt.
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Buying an ailing company can be viable if said company has notable assets to go with it - and then we get to one of the factor in Alpha Dream's demise. They didn't diversify enough. Beside their first two games, everything they did were licensed titles, and I doubt the Koto Battle and Tomato Adventure IPs would be particularly valuable to anyone,
 
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To be honest, I doubt AphaDream would have ever been able to come up with a strong enough IP to sway their client into buying them. That would be the case with any second party company making games for Nintendo, really. Mario, Zelda, Animal Crossing and Splatoon would just punt all potential new franchises off a space station.
 
Mcmadness said:
On top of all that, I think that a lot of people just weren't interested in a Mario rpg anymore except the diehards, the series sales had been in a steady decline with each new installment on the 3DS.
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Maybe Mario & Luigi style ones but Paper Mario Origami King did really well and I think Mario + Rabbids was no slouch either in customer interest, so I think that interest is still there, just maybe not for that series.
 
Mario + Rabbids was at one point the highest-selling third party game on the Switch. It has since only been overtaken by Minecraft, Among Us and Monster Hunter. I think the demand for Mario RPGs is still there, it's just that the market's finnicky or some shit idk.

Origami King isn't an RPG. The series now puts more emphasis on the open world/sandbox aspect than commonplace RPG elements like a party system and experience points.