Star Fox Zero not profitable at all

how about railshooting mixed with some other gameplay elements, like on foot missions, third person shooting, third person combat, exploration, platforming, maybe even some rpg elements lightly.....star fox adventures was heading in the right direction, it was ahead of its time for this franchise

It's called Star Fox Assault. Despite getting more expensive online now (which doesn't make any sense, you'll see why later), many fans HATED that game (I wasn't one of them as I liked it) for not only including all those bolded, for doing it badly (YMMV, personally I think Assault did on-foot missions better than Rebel Strike did).

And again, how can Adventures be a step in the right direction when fans hated as much as the devs at Rare did?

You're asking the wrong person, personally I thought SF: A was one of the better titles available on the Gamecube.

@jcrame10:

Starfox Zero does all this expanding while also staying true to the roots of the series. There's rail sections, open sections, and the Walker plays like a more fluid mech game. The controls are very sim like.

@Heirren: the controls were cumbersome, especially with the little robot guy. It was a good try at implementation but definitely needed some polishing.

I will give it a try at some point.

@nintendoboy16: rogue squadron and freespace are not that different really (just rogue squaron handles like a pig).

and people would recognise it as starfox because it would have star fox slapped on the box. the number of people who care about it being an arcade game is probably dwarfed by the number of people who though "meh" because it is an arcade game....at full price.

nintendo need to exapnd their appeal to people who currently dont play nitnendos games...they have to do this. star fox is one of their IPs that is ideal for doing this because it currently doesnt have enough fans to worry about any fallout. it needs a complete overhaul and it needs to do things with absolutely no consideration of any existing userbase if it has any chance of making any decent money. it has to attract new customers.

the old formula dating back to the snes days is irrelevant..its dead. no one cares. its a dinosaur. unlike metroid, zelda and mario, starfox has not had its ocarina, its prime. its stuck on a very very old and restricted design approach and there just throwing crud at it to try and bulk this design.

there is nothing to say you cant have a freespace, but faster (though freespace is pretty fast) where there are small on rails sections where you fly into a ship, blow its whatever, and get out to a big map again and complete tasks in the level and each level can score you on different things (damage taken, enemies killed etc.). and cut some of the fat off certainly.

star fox needs its prime and that means pissing off the few fans it has left. either that or write it off but star fox, in its current form, is unacceptable.

god i remember playing starwing and it inspired. it was amazing due to the cutting edge tech, tight controls and doing really cool stuff. it was a game you used to show off your snes and it really felt like more was possible with games when playing it at the time. now...now the IP seems small.

Uh, what? Rogue Squadron is a fast paced arcade style shooter for consoles. Freespace is a SIM built for PC that requires more complex controls. How are they "not that different?" Do you think Smash is not much different than traditional fighters by that logic? Do you think Metroid Prime is not much different than Doom?

Having the name on the box means very little if it's otherwise very different in every other way. Look at Star Fox Adventures. People didn't see Star Fox, they saw a Zelda clone. Look at the Goldeneye 2010 remake with Daniel Craig. People didn't see the Goldeneye they remember on the N64 during the Brosnan era, they saw a Call of Duty clone. Hell, expanding to other media, look at the 2003 cartoon version of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. That was basically recycling the animator's previous work, with a hint of another popular show on the same network at the time, just slapped with a Star Wars skin. You can't have Star Fox pander to the freaking PC flight sim crowd and slap "Star Fox" on it when it's too radically different from the past games.

"star fox needs its prime and that means pissing off the few fans it has left" So you endorse the idea of Nintendo saying "**** you" to the people that still support them in favor of pandering to an audience that otherwise doesn't care about them? That's hardly much better than what the pro-"Nintendo should be third party" crowd endorses.

@nintendoboy16: Well a bad source is better than none at all. tell me the definition of "sold like ass" please.... what number equates to sold like ass and what equates to selling good etc? Do we know whether or not it was profitable. Also any Time I did use those numbers I suggested (with a grain of salt).

Also the only other fans? This place overall hyped hyrule warriors more so than Bayonetta 2.

@jcrame10:

Sounds like you need to practice.

@iandizion713: because the bulk of game sales drop off after its first week. Halo 5 sold 2 million-ish and it's having a hard time getting to 5 million, 7 months later. With a steady stream of meaningful updates and content drops.

Now 5 million copies probably cover the cost of the game and marketing, just barely for halos massive team, marketing campaigns ect. Not sure that 500k will cover the cost of star Fox Zero. Think abo will it. 250k*60 is 15 million. 500k-600k is 30-35 million. There's also shipping and packaging, The advertising in YouTube and the internet. Advertisement in Japan, Europe ect. I'd be surprised if the advertising budget wasn't 30 million.

@mayceV: It was barely advertised, and Nintendo didnt sign TV contracts like they usually do, which cost big money. Plus the game was done on the cheap by a studio looking for a chance to make a name for themselves. The budget of the game was also low. Nintendo also stated that Wii U is designed so good that good budget games only have to sell bout 750k copies for good profit.

Star Fox Zero was cheaper then your average budget Wii U game due to its designs and cost saving practices they use. Plus the game was kinda just a redo of the old game, so im sure that helped a bunch too.

Nintendo payed Platinum to make the game, deal is done. Whether the game sells good or not, doesnt really matter, Star Fox is worth more then that. Its the ideal of Star Fox Zero that Nintendo payed for. And that will pay off in the end.

Same with Xenoblade Chronicles. The first game sold like shat. Then Nintendo funded the second game and it didnt sell too much, but did good. But guess what, Nintendo bout to fund another. Xenoblade Chronicles is worth more then just sales, its the ideal of Xenoblade that makes Nintendo money.

@nintendoboy16: rogue squadron wasnt that fast paced. freespace and starlancer were faster. freespace is very much a "Sim" rather than a sim also...its a lot closer to an arcade game. yes it had 1million controls but the game was perfectly playable with a small fraction of them and everything important a game like that would need could be done on modern controllers. freespace wasnt complicated. its not that different from rogue squadron once you get down to the business of killing enemies. there is far bigger differences between metroid prime and doom or smash and street fighter than there are between rogue squadron and freespace. play rogue squadron in first person (could you do that? i cant remember now) and its not that different at all.

we are not talking about something like elite or X here.

and yes i absolutely endorse nitnendo telling the few remaining existing star fox fans left to stick it. if they keep making star fox like starwing on the snes then its doomed to irrelevance (its already irrelevant. when a star fox launches its suppoed to be a big deal yet no one cared) and nitnendo will just completely stop making them. it needs a BSG type complete overhaul (in the sense that the wishes of the fans have absolutley no bearing on what direction the game goes).

500,000 sales is incredibly poor for what should be one of nintendos pillars.

Aw no, their 3 hour N64 game didn't sell well? Lol. Bet they still made a profit on it. How much could it's budget have been?

It's a joke that in 2016, there are space games like Star Citizen, No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, hell go back decades to Freespace and Tie Fighter, but Nintendo are still making their ancient, full price rail shooters. Oh, but it has a chicken bot now! Haha

@locopatho: that's disrespectful to starfox 64, because that game is still a shit load better than zero. The fact that they do less than that game is just absurd.

@jg4xchamp:

Zero is far better. It isn't even close. All-range mode in 64 is AWFUL in comparison to Zero. Zero has real depth. People just can't seem to grasp the game.

@jg4xchamp: Ha, fair point. Glad I know at this point that a "Platinum" label does NOT necessariylu mean "Day 1 Buy!" (No offense to them. They do what they need to to get paid, their premier titles still show the quality!)

@locopatho: personally that style of game would still be great, rogue leader is a shit load better than most games we get these days, but Nintendo gonna Nintendo. What a waste of platinum.

The stuff I don't like about Bayonetta 2 is all nintendos fault lol.

"Video gaming analyst"

Yeah, we can trust him to know exactly how much money Nintendo has made on the game.

It just doesn't have that Nintendo charm and appeal to it.

I hope they consider giving it a substantial price drop, I might actually consider picking i up if the price was right. I'd be fine paying cheap just to see where it all went wrong first-hand, and in the off chance I might actually be one of the few who enjoys it (happened with Other M).

@aigis: Well it is a on-rail shooter so yeah.

I think that the down fall was the forced control ... this is where Splatoon did better because you could remove the gyroscope control.

I also think that asking 79,99$ CAD for this is way too much ... it looks like it is the same caliber as Captain Toad which sold for like 39,99$CAD when it came out ...

Star Fox Zero is a great game. The critiques are all over the place here like: it needs to be more like my other favorite Star Fox game, it needs to be more like my other unrelated favorite space game, it needs to be more like an action-platformer, it is no good because of motion controls, and it is no good because Nintendo is no good. The guy that made this thread likes to make negative versus threads for the clicks, and has been badmouthing Star Fox Zero several months before the game actually came out, and comparing Star Fox Zero to Ratchet and Clank. Hey, what if Star Fox Zero was a role-playing game?!

I would too, I couldn't shake the reveal of the game and cant bring myself to pay full price for the game. It's either that or I'm going to Gamefly it.

I'm sorry, but did you really call Star Fox a pillar? It hasn't been a pillar since... well, ever, not even in the N64 and GameCube era's. Metroid even lost it's place as a "Pillar for Nintendo" when that was absent in the N64 era and when Pokemon was on the rise.

And a "piss of your old fans" mentality NEVER works. not only is Miyamoto (oh I can't wait for his retirement, and not only because it's needed on his end, but the hypocrisy over it will be unbearable) getting flak for it, but other creators like George Lucas are getting it too

This is a real shame especially since the first two, StarFox SNES and StarFox 64 were such great games.

Nintendo needs to stop the gimmicks.

How about being sold under Nintendo's expectations? Like I said, they have said **** all about it selling. That should tell you how bad it is.

Trot him out occasionally to say nice things about new talent and a game he's excited about? Yeah, I can live with that.

@nintendoboy16: i said it should be. it clearly isn't at the moment.

as for the star wars analogy...it still made loads of money, people still bought the rereleases with 15 seconds of changed footage and star wars continued just fine. but its also not a really apt comparison since star wars has a very big fanbase that makes who ever owns it loads of money.

star fox is not. its more in the same situation as the original BSG TV series. sure it has some fans but not enough to warrant just releasing a new TV show thats very similar. instead they completely gutted it out for the reboot. the only things they kept were the basic idea (humanity gets wiped out and a few straggelers are on the run) and the name. everything else could be for the chopping block.

and it worked. it attracted tons of new audiences and is one of the most highly regarded sci-fi series ever. it annoyed the few fans of the original no end but the end product was excellent and made a lot more people think about BSG again.

I don't CARE about how popular one series is over another, that is irrelevant once you know Nintendo's legacy. There was a reason casual film goers and hardcore Star Wars fans cheered when Lucas sold his stuff to Disney and said for the door not to hit him on the way out. It still proves that pissing off your fans, no matter how little, is NEVER a good thing, and making Star Fox pander to the PC Sim crowd will make Star Fox fans done with Nintendo and they can't afford to piss anybody else in their fandom off right now (not like the pro-"Nintendo should be third party" cares).

@nintendoboy16: tells me you come to conclusions alot. Unless you have some partial say in Nintendo like share holder or CEO then you know zero.

@nintendoboy16: and i would contend that there simply isnt enough star fox fans left to really worry about any fallout if they do do an overhaul. basically they have nothing to lose by trying something different. 500,000....at best that maybe made a little money but not enough to make another one. of those 500,000...how many bought a wiiu for it? well there doesnt seem to be any sales spike in the wiiu so...close to nada. in other words i doubt even 5% of that figure would actually drop nintendo just because they overhauled star fox.

look...freespace/crimson skies is a suggestion. its the direction i think they should be looking at (mainly because interest is growing in the former type of game again and nintendo could make an excellent one). it doesnt have to be that. it could be something else. but they have to try something else. making it like star wing is not working and will not work. tacking on the ground sections is just rubbish. having the different vehicle mods is silly. if they want to charge full whack then they have to justify it and that type of game is not going to cut it.

star fox can, and should, be in much much better shape than it is. it needs its prime.

Star Fox Zero has only been out for 6 weeks (initial release date 4/21/2016). It could still have a decent lifetime sales. More copies will be sold around Christmas 2016. Every game need not sell at Mario Kart levels to be successful.

Played through it twice sunshine, mark brown's toolkit episode even highlights how a prominent speed runner has his complaints, yeah there are systems in place that would make for an interesting score attack game (you know one without leaderboards in the 21st century). But the controlling the game part is needlessly messy for the sake of being "different". That's not depth, that's just shoddy game design. Bayonetta is a game of depth, it's controls are actually straight forward and simple. Ditto Vanquish, at most you would argue that Vanquish doesn't have the most ubiquitous third person shooter control scheme. And they are greater games for focusing their depths on the internal systems, and less about making the controls just messy.

Zero in contrast is counter-intuitive, and since I already know the "sim" argument is coming, might I suggest the crazy notion, that you actually play a space sim or a flight sim from this planet, so we can both come to the even ground that Star Fox Zero is a lot of things, a flight sim it isn't.

As for Zero, lets see less branching paths, more restrictions on your branching paths, less boss sequences, you actually have to unlock the mode that lets you play the game where you need to do it in one go, no leaderboard which would be an obvious addition for a sequel to Starfox 1 and 64, and oh yeah the aformentioned controls are counter intuitive in comparison.

Yeah man, fucking gem that one.

It absolutely is not, it's from the lack of Kamiya. Which yeah, it's been streamlined but it's the tighter experience all around and doesn't have the annoyances the first game had.

Platinum probably had near 0 input on creative process in star fox, it's Miyamoto's turd. They were brought in as slave labor to finish the game :P

There is no leaderboards- which is on nintendo

Without a reason for combo scoring, why even make a string of combo heavy areas, and make it more about the medal system itself. Creatively that's Hashimoto's move, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is an absolute direct result of them needing to work around not having leaderboards.

The controller being fucking shit in comparison to the 360 controller (from basic subtle movement, to the buttons themselves not being good enough for how much you can mash in spots in Bayonetta) for half the things you want to do, yeah that's also on nintendo, why the **** are the dead zones so obnoxious on that pro controller? That's on Nintendo.

The part where they took away some of Bayonetta's tools and it not delivering on the finale the way Bayonetta 1 did, and that it's a much easier game made for pussies who cry when they get a stone trophy, yeah fair enough that one is probably on Platinum. Some of the other design decisions, if it's not Nintendo directly, it's the indirect effect of Nintendo's platform. But yeah Starfox they were slave labor, they should have actually let Platinum do a starfox game. It probably wouldn't have blown cock the way it did.

Just switch to the more traditional controls. You dont have to use the modern ones. The controls may be deep and complex, but once you master them, theyre fun. Its like Platinum heaven.

I thought the hidden paths were too hard to find. I did like that they didnt make me replay everything to unlock alternate paths though, that was cool.

You can't disable them entirely. It's not even like you can replace the gyro with the pointer controls of a wiimote (which actually works for these type of games), so not the just change it to "you have to hold the button to use gyro" isn't an improvement. It's not even a fix.

@jg4xchamp: Many reviewers have praised the more traditional controls for giving a nice old school feel. Sure you have to use motion for a little bit, but its easy.

@iandizion713:

Well we have learned today that somebody sucks at video games.

lol

You need to learn what actual depth is in video games. How are they hard to find? The game puts up portals on your follow up playthrough and that's when a lot of the paths are unlocked. There actually is no discovering to it. A stage select isn't bad, not being able to do it on your initial stuff is inherently lame though.

So just so we're clear, you have no actual defense for why, a medium in which you go through the trouble to post about on the internet, you are willfully ignorant about? Just so we're on the same page.

Good, innovation for innovations sake is a terrible way to make a game.

@jg4xchamp: Cause i played through the whole game twice and didnt find not one. Most the portals are hidden. Have to unlock door, or follow dude at certain times. One you have to get dudes health down quick enough. And even when you do find them, there hard hidden levels.

@jg4xchamp:

The fact there are some that find reason in the control scheme denounces the "shit control" argument. There's logic behind them. The majority of people playing the game, or popular opinion, does not comprehend them. People often find it hard to admit when they are wrong.

So just so we're clear, just so I know what brand of half assed arguments I'm getting. It's totally cool for you to validate these controls with "some people get it", thus they must work, but anyone that criticizes them or didn't care for them must not "get it" or isn't good at the game. And you see now flaw in this argument? No possible hole in that line of thinking?

@jg4xchamp:

What don't you understand about the controls? You understand why things were changed, correct?

I don't like them fundamentally, I don't get how they are an actual improvement of just letting me use the sticks, or doing what Sin and Punishment 2 does as far as rail shooters are concerned. Because as they are bread and butter sequences, they add nothing to it. In theory I could do more shooters than just rely on lock on, but properly aiming with an analog or even the wiimote would have done that, and it would be more reliable, also more comfortable while we're at it.

In theory all range mode and enemies having specific weak spots is where this is supposed to be a highlight, in practice: most of the standard enemies you don't actually need to aim, because a charge shot at the right angle will just home in on the spot. On bosses you sort of do, and because they are primarily archaic in their design, they have giant gaps between their attacks that leave you wide openings. So again it's not a benefit to the experience.

Wii sports? I get why playing wii bowling with the remote is more enjoyable than analog sticks. There is an obvious connection there that is lost, even Red Steel 2 i get the adjustments made to make a unique experience. Even that zombie game, I think it's just shallow besides its control gimmick. It's obvious see what advantage a mouse and keyboard has in genres like shooters are rts games over a gamepad. The wiipad's gryo controls? No, if any thing what's obvious how much they held back and gimped the game because they had to work around the gryo controls.

Any struggles I had rarely had to do with the enemies in front of me or the scenarios that were presented, but more to do with me adjusting to the controls. And frankly that's not how actual good games do it. The Witness never challenges my understanding of the interface (while not in terms of me executing a button press), but more so my understanding of its systems. That's how Bayonetta does things. That's how STALKER does things. That's actually how Mario 64 does things. Yeah the controls in Mario 64 are more complicated than what's been done with Mario recently, but the actual challenges aren't you figuring out the controls, the actual challenge is understanding the systems, and then executing. There is usually a more expert way to beat levels, but even with the basics of the control scheme you can get most if not all the stars in Mario 64, by sheer attrition.

Star Fox Zero, is the control scheme, and rarely anything more than a rail shooter. They didn't improve upon any of Star Fox 64s level design, or bosses, or enemy designs, or even structure, in fact a lot of it is worse, they gave me a new control scheme, which for maybe one positives, showed more limitations.

@jg4xchamp: Problem is if you use the right stick for aiming you lose a few buttons. Moving these buttons to the right analog stick allows for you to have a smoother more deep fight. Take it away, and we have to move the moves back to individual buttons. We dont have many buttons on the controller anyways, so it hurts the advancements made by adding new controls to Star Fox.

Nintendo still has a long way to go to modernizing Star Fox. You can kinda see the foundation they are building, but they have to make it even more accessible to others. The controls are too complex i agree, too chaotic, take too long to get use to. The problem is, how do we simplify the controls, this they need to do.

But this aint easy, you can tell they tried to do it on Star Fox 3D, but that was a mess, Gyro didnt work good, not even smooth enough. Star Fox Zero does a much better job at advancing the series then Star Fox 3D did. But, still not enough.

Once they figure it out, playing Star Fox in first person view? Heaven.

I know that there is secret level in Corneria but I haven't unlocked it yet. I have progressed in the game to Fichina and have not found any secret levels yet. There are no leaderboards in Star Fox Zero, but what Wii U owners do is take a screen capture of the level or medals section to show the Miiverse community what they have accomplished. I only have 1 or 2 medals at this point out of many. I have over 6 hours of playtime in Star Fox Zero at this point. When I finish the game I will go back and try to find the secret levels and get as many medals as I can. One of the neat things the second screen does is gives you a cockpit view while shooting targets behind you when you fly past.