Beautiful End said:
Well, MML might not stick to the well-known Megaman stuff, like Dr. Wily and 9 Robot bosses and stuff, but it was still pretty good. To me, Megaman Battle Network was horrible. A game where Megaman wears a spandex suit and is being controlled by some kid because he's a computer program or something? Essentially, a Pokemon-like game? That was rock bottom, if you ask me. Yet, the franchise managed to sell a bunch of games and get a bunch of sequels. So even if it wasn't the Megaman from the 80s/90s, it was still pretty popular. They must have done something right.
I think it's the same with MML here. Yeah, I can't confirm the game would sell as fast as...free pancakes with a cup of hot chocolate. I mean, I don't work at Capcom (See what I did there?). But again, based only on the fans' reaction to all that stuff regarding MML, you can tell people were pretty pumped up about the game. Not only that, but because Capcom was supposedly working with us, the fans, we were kinda led to believe the game would be REALLY good. And even those who were new to the franchise but still helped with the project, just for the sake of helping, would be more inclined to buy the game.
To be fair the problem with fan reactions is always that the reactions are coming from fans. No offense. I mean, I was still genuinely excited about the prospect of Duke Nukem Forever actually getting a release... And, to be fair, on that front, I still don't think my girlfriend understands my excitement for Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
In the latter case, the excitement was justified, in the former less so. There are a lot of fans who are really excited for the Fireaxis X-Com game (myself included), in spite of it having
no connection to the original franchise.
Now, none of this is intended to be an attack on you, but fans are by definition going to be excited by the prospect of more to their beloved franchise.
Beautiful End said:
Getting the fans involved and interested in the project was a great move by Capcom. It's something that Tim Schafer did pretty well too with his Double Fine Kickstarter project that managed to fund a heapload of money, way beyond expectations.
Canceling the game and then blaming it on the fans and something they hadn't even done yet was a horrible, HORRIBLE move by Capcom.
It's not like they were trying to make a Duke Nukem sequel; a sequel to a game so bad that it shouldn't even be allowed to exist. MML wasn't all bad. Even for a Megaman spin-off, it had a good plot, memorable characters and the last game left us with a cliffhanger. Fans want more of it and the proof is the number of fans it still has after all these years, which is more than can be said for even better games that people have easily forgotten about.
To be fair, and given how long DNF was in production, it's easy to miss this, the original Duke Nukem games, the ones from the nineties, were actually pretty good. Duke 3d was pretty politically incorrect, but it was an effective satire of action heroes. I'm not going to go into a dissection of all the things wrong with DNF, in large part because once the first reviews came back, I decided it was not the franchise it used to be, and nothing I wanted any part of anymore.
Beautiful End said:
So yeah, I don't see this game as a better choice over any Megaman game, for that matter. A new IP can't sell as good as a well-known franchise. It's the same reason why CoD games sell so well: they're all essentially the same with a few tweaks here and there. but people who love CoD games will continue to buy the next CoD game because it has the name CoD in it. Capcom had a great chance and they pretty much destroyed it.
Again with the "to be fair" bit, but: Each iteration of COD sells, not because of the name, but because it's the "it" franchise of the moment. In a very real sense, CoD is
the multiplayer death match shooter for the consoles. Now, because each iteration of CoD is inherently incompatible, for people who actually want that multiplayer deathmatch shooter, they really aren't given a choice. They can upgrade to the newest version or be excluded. Simultaneously, if they involve themselves in a social element, that is to say, have friends in the community, they're compelled to upgrade or loose track of those friendships.
While the IP is what guides the senseless masses from one game to the next, CoD is a kind of unique situation, more akin to sports games than conventional marketing, and therefore a somewhat poor IP to highlight.
That said, you're right, an established IP is usually a more reliable cash cow then an untested one, but the reasons for that are a bit more complex than they initially appear.
Used to be, and this number could have changed, but used to be 90% of games released would fail to recoup their production costs. In an era when a AAA game's budget is $50m, it's not hard to see where an untested franchise that is likely to fail is far less appealing than a franchise with a known success rate.
In the case of Megaman, they seem to have decided that an untested IP is more likely to recoup it's losses than it is. Which, I'll admit, is strange, but, if that's accurate then their 10m number isn't some pie in the sky number they want, it could very well be what they need to remain solvent long enough to get RE6 out. Which is also a disturbing prospect.
I mean, at the end of the day, as a developer, you don't can a project once it's left preproduction unless you really cannot afford to publish it. It's why the DA2 expansion pack being canceled after it had gone into development is a really worrying trend for Bioware, and why when Obsidian is talking about canceling projects, it starts to look like they're taking water over the side.
Now, no offense to you, but in this case, it does look like Capcom is in trouble, and like Megaman just isn't a strong enough name for them to justify spending the rest of the money they needed to get it to market. What they've done is said that it's safer to take a risk on an unknown IP than publish another Megaman game.
