But sex sells…

Okay now the pre-emptive responses to the rhetoric that I know is coming.

But Bayonetta 2 was a port to the Wii-U which is an unpopular console!

Yes! But the Wii-U has sold >1.9 MILLION units in Japan – initial sales figures for Bayonetta vary but everyone seems to agree that didn’t even break forty thousand sales.

Also, the title was a Wii-U exclusive because it was believed that it would motivate people who hadn’t bought a Wii-U to go out and get one.

But, it was competing against Smash Bros!

Yes. Yes is was.  The nature of the video games industry is that it highly competitive.  They are seasonal products and all the big studios compete for dominance of the season.

Nintendo chose the release dates and they’ve been doing this for a while, so you can interpret either as a vote of no-confidence or they had a good basis to believe Smash Bros sales on the 3DS were not going to impact Bayonetta’s.

It’s a game made for people who like that, let people have that!

No it was a game made for mass appeal, not only did they want it to be bought by almost everyone who owns a Wii-U – they wanted people to go out and buy a Wii-U so they could play it.

It’s bombing like this is actually very upsetting for the games industry in general, because when a big production fails like this it jeopardizes the jobs of hundreds of employees who didn’t get a say in what kind of marketing and costuming design decisions.

Plus it means that somewhere there is a guy who had a plan who wanted to develop and actual good game with a good marketing campaign, but the company decided to go with the trashy game that nobody wanted.

– wincenworks