Does Nintendo of America Actually Hate Its Fanbase?

Over the past few weeks Nintendo fans have united for a project called ‘Operation Rainfall’; a movement aimed at forcing Nintendo’s hand in bringing over the titles The Last Story, Xenoblade, and Pandora’s Tower. The operation seemingly failed though, as after a bit of hope initially emerged it was quickly shot down as Nintendo of America announced that it had no plans to bring the titles to the states. So what gives?

For the time being, I’m going to give Nintendo the benefit of the doubt. Yes, it’s true that Nintendo has thus far refused to bring over the likes of Fatal Frame 4, Disaster: Day of Crisis, Another Code: R, and, probably most infamously, Mother 3, to the states, but it seems to me like Nintendo may just be storing up for the coming winter.

“The coming winter?” you ask. Well yes, did you not watch Nintendo’s E3 conference? Have you not paid attention to the release schedule for the Wii in 2011-2012? No? Let me enlighten you then. Between now and Christmas Nintendo is currently hoping to publish the new Kirby, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and Fortune Street. After that… there is nothing. The Wii U is probably coming out for the holiday season of 2012, and if Nintendo is smart, they will have their studios working around the clock to guarantee that the Wii U launch is mighty impressive so as to not have a repeat of the Nintendo 3DS launch. So what does that leave the dedicated Wii fanbase?

Well, right now, nothing. If your primary console is the Nintendo Wii, once 2012 hits you have a whole year of looking forward to… the Wii U and nothing else. OK, so Kirby will probably slip into 2012 for the U.S. If it does, then it’ll probably be a January or February release. That leaves… eight to nine months of nothing. Eight to nine months of your Wii collecting dust while you begrudgingly wait for the new thing to come out. Historically, Nintendo of America hasn’t let this happen. The closest they’ve gotten to this type of scenario was on the N64, but even then N64 fans got Dr. Mario 64 about five months prior to the Gamecube launch. And Nintendo of America did an OK job supporting the Gamecube in its final year, publishing titles like Baten Kaitos Origins, Odama, and their own The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (the proper left-handed-Link version to fanatical fans). So from a business perspective, it makes perfect sense to keep your fans on the edge of their seats, drooling over and begging for these titles. You guys are giving Nintendo so much free publicity for this stuff it isn’t even funny, and I imagine the hope is that, once these titles are given to us (one by one, and never announcing the remaing game(s) of course), they will sell fairly well.

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  1. Let’s consider the fact that Nintendo had a rich history of bringing over lot’s of Japanese RPG’s with the NES and SNES. This was 3 generations ago, but if you were to calculate the number of actual games sales based off those ports, you could start to see the reasoning behind these kind of decisions, they just simply won’t make money off these over here in the US. Maybe I can start a website trying to get Ford Motor Company to release the new global Ford Ranger that got nixed for the US over here, and let’s see how far that one goes… different tastes altogether here in the States.