Thursday, September 6, 2012

Who's Agreeing With Me Now

(Apologies to Stephen Colbert for the post title.)

I had an article a while ago that explained what went wrong with the Mega Man series of games. Here's a quote from the article:
If Capcom wants to make 50 RPGs a year in a series no one cares about, fine. Spin off the series. Take the Mega Man name off of it. YOU'RE DILUTING THE BRAND. [...] Mega Man is iconic, and making Generic RPG X or Platformer X and slapping a reference to Mega Man in there is irresponsible and is cheapening your brand.
Lo and behold, a Capcom executive agrees with me!

I (and probably I alone so please don’t ascribe said belief to “Capcom”) think one of the problems MM has had as a brand is that we’ve had too many competing splinter sub-brands within it.
YES! Exactly!

Look, Mario can support sub-brands. He's the most popular video game character in the world, and in every Mario game, you actually play as Mario. Mega Man, while important and well-known, isn't as popular as Mario, and making Mega Man games without Mega Man is just plain irresponsible to the brand. Making tons of Mega Man side-series isn't working. It has to stop.

Fortunately, we've seen that Mega Man releases have slowed down considerably recently. This is a good sign. Capcom might be coming around. Fingers crossed.

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