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EDIT:
SMB4, fresh from the Screenshots section:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2985284287
SMB3:
https://redundantrobot.com/super_mega_baseball/player_pics/overdogs-guy_gold.png
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2095409338
It just went on sale for 30% off, one month after release. That is a clear indicator that this game is not selling well; you don't provide a large discount this early unless you're desperate to attract new players. Include the fact that they're not putting older titles on sale, and it's clear that there's a concern regarding those games taking interest away from SMB 4.
Again, this isn't something a game with healthy sales numbers should be worried about.
I don't know what reality you live in, but in this one the facts speak for themselves.
SMB 5 would be another incremental update on 4 with a feature nobody cares about that they’d market the hell out of and I would give them my money on release day because that’s just what I am at this point.
If they want serious sales they either need to make a real baseball franchise game (with drafts, minor leagues, team control, and contracts) or go into a new sport. There’s only so many times you can release effectively the same game before people just stop paying attention.
The hockey market is probably wide open. But then I don't think hockey games sell well, so that could be a losing strategy.
Maybe it's just a reality that this studio ends with SMB? I can't think of another sport for them to cover that would also make the returns worthwhile, but isn't something EA or 2K already has a stranglehold on (Golf, Football, Basketball, etc).
And obviously, the interest in Baseball titles from Metalhead is on the decline.
Did you really just use it being on sale to justify it being bad? It's the Steam SUMMER SALE right now. Almost every game is on sale... Jesus...
Metalhead’s development strategy of incremental updates coupled with being in a bit of a niche market has set them up to be competing with their own games.
There's something to that old saying, when everyone else is an issue the problem is probably you
Christ, you sound like one of those dorks who keeps buying Madden or NBA games despite the fact they're glorified roster updates.
Not to mention that in SMB4, when you look at the names they give you that the announcer can say, the pro players' names are all in there!
The Rogue Fedora is a perfect example of how parasocial relationships have wreaked so much havoc on pop culture. The guy is defending this ♥♥♥♥ like we're attacking his own mother. Like, it's one thing to say hey, man, I'm sorry you dislike the game, but I'm having a blast, and another to look at these issues you two have highlighted and go "Y'ALL ARE TROLLING EVERY GAME GOES ON SALE IN THE SUMMER DERP!"
SMB4 was put on sale in the middle of the Summer Sale, and Fedora sees no problem with that? Really?
Sounds to me like Metalhead's doing what Zipper did to SOCOM. "Reaching out to a broader audience" by doing the same ♥♥♥♥ they could get anywhere else. I mean, look at how they stressed the inclusion of pro players....that you could use in MLB The Show. With appropriate stats, too.
Oh, and they wouldn't be missing anybody, either. You don't include Stan Musial or Yogi Berra but you include literal who's like Brett Butler and Boog Powell? And if "licensing costs" was the problem, then why even bother? I remember one guy even tried to say on here that it was never the point to have "legends" in the game, just pro players.
Really?
Because LEGENDS was the exact word used for months before release. Even the freakin' deep dive from Metalhead themselves called them legends.
The reason I stress this so much is because this was clearly where all the marketing went to. Hardly anything about customization or much requested features and modes like a home run derby.
Nope, it was pretty much all LEGENDS OMG...
Again, no one is saying SMB4 is total ♥♥♥♥. We've all seen and played worse. We're saying that it's basically more of the same we've already got, so what's the point? I see people talking about "gameplay improvements," when they could've just patched those into SMB3. "Franchise mode improvements" which could've been in SMB3 from the get go (not to mention they're not really as good as touted).
SMB1 to SMB2 felt like real, meaningful improvement. I would consider SMB2 to be one of my top ten favorite games of all time. It's the one I have the most hours in. I waited till SMB3 was on sale for really cheap because I didn't see anything about SMB3 that made me feel like I was buying a new game. It looks, and eventually plays like, a glorified patch. SMB3 to SMB4 is basically more of that, and it's a shame.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. What they should've done was put all that into SMB2 and moved onto a different sport instead of making SMB3 and up. Plus, if they're trying to get newcomers into SMB, why would they buy SMB4? What's stopping them from buying SMB3, 2 or even 1?
As for hockey games, the problem is that the devs behind hockey games these days add some bland, generic roguelite ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to their games when all they need to do is emulate Metalhead - just make a simple, easy to pick up and play sports game with customization elements. Don't just wrap a vague sports veneer around the roguelite game you'd rather be making.
Lastly, as for SMB5? I'm pretty sure that'll probably be when the microtransactions kick in. I can see them going back to SMB1's style (contracts and such to develop your team), but you can pay to win.
Who's up for UT mechanics?!
(Inb4 someone mentions Metalhead said that EA told 'em they could work independently - yeah, I'm sure those folks at Maxis thought much the same when it came to Spore lol)
"Super Mega Baseball™ 4 is where the Legends play. The signature combo of arcade-inspired style and immersive gameplay returns with over 200 baseball Legends and a grand slam of presentation upgrades."
Yet someone actually tried to say that people were wrong to expect all the big names like Musial, Berra, Killebrew, Cobb, etc, etc.
I get if you like the game, but have some respect for people's intelligence.
The sad thing is there are things to market this game around that would actually draw people in. It has a lot of really nice touches that bring the gameplay to life in a way 2 and 3 really lack. The excitement of the team when a guy hits a big homerun is palpable, the movement on a slider vs a curveball is sharp and satisfying, the motions of the catcher grabbing and trying to frame pitches that are just inside or outside. You can tell the animator really cared and was trying to make something special here where a lot of aspects of the game (like loyalty which should be so much better than it is) were completely phoned in.
There are a lot of really good ideas and some nicely executed elements here that carry this game for me, but legends just isn't one of them and never came across as interesting. The whole point of this series is that it wasn't the MLB, you could build your own leagues and stories (which could include historic players or be entirely random or fictional). There was absolutely no point to even including the legends in a game with a player editor and yet they made it their central marketing focus.
Also, it looks better now but can we acknowledge how utterly low effort the store page looked during early access? Even now it's slightly better laid out but other than the legends it doesn't really describe anything interesting in the game, but early on when they wanted preorders it was literally 3 paragraphs followed by 4 GIFs without even spacing between them. It was lower effort than the page for WASTED which is currently on sale for 1.30 (and is well worth it btw), a game whose primary objective is drinking non-sewage derived alcohol.
When it doesn't look like you care about selling the game, why would anyone who isn't already familiar want to buy it? To me this was the worst failure on their part, they put years of development and significant amounts of money into making this game and never even bothered to make the store page basically presentable.
There were just so many strange decisions and obvious missteps around marketing this game that anyone outside it could have told them would happen months beforehand and most of us were telling them when early access came out. They have nobody to blame for this game's slow start but themselves, and that's sad because it's clear there are still some people working there who genuinely care about making a special baseball game.
I would be surprised if anyone from that original team cared about Legends or Content Creators being included, given that the premise of this Franchise has always been centered around fictional teams & players. But they don't make the final decisions anymore.
Given that this is the first major misstep in my opinion, you have to look at what's different. And while I'm not a fan of jumping on the "EA ruins everything" train, there is a clear precedent seen in other titles. It's also the primary difference between the last 3 games and SMB4, in terms of what's new on the studio side of things.
I imagine they're in panic mode now, where the need to get sales numbers up is high. Hopefully it's not a situation where, if sales remain lower than expected, work ends and the additional updates necessary are just abandoned. Because, as a software dev who makes products for profitability, I know higher ups don't like wasting resources on efforts that don't pull in a profit. And game dev is several magnitudes harsher than your average software development shop.