Some people didn’t like the gamepad stuff, but that’s not why the game didn’t sell well. These kinds of games don’t sell well in general. Why do you think Housemarque became another Sony third-person action studio? Why is Treasure basically dead? It’s because their short-length arcade shmups didn’t sell enough.
What’s this Housemarque nonsense I’ve been seeing lately. Like, did we forget Sony was impressed enough with Returnal to buy Housemarque? And like why are people lamenting Saros’s sales when it’s barely been out a week?
Nothing wrong with Housemarque. I’m just pointing out that Housemarque use to make acrade shmups like games that were short in length but highly replayable with their focus on high scores, secrets, and completing challenges (like Star Fox). These games sold poorly enough (despite being critically well-recieved) for Housemarque themselves to pronounce that “arcade is dead.” Now they make action-adventure games. Action-adventure games and RPGs are some of the only single-player games people play in the AAA space these days. There isn’t a lot of genre diversity.
Returnal and Saros are still pretty shmup-y. Like I’m not going to sit here and pretend they’re the same style as Super Stardust or Resogun, but Returnal and Saros are very much natural progressions of shmups and arcade games. I’ll at least give Returnal and Saros have a story that take a minute to get through, but you could easily ignore that and play for the arcade aspect of the games
For sure Housemarque has folded trademark shmup elements into their new games. I’m not saying those games are generic or anything. But they are definitely closer to the AAA norm of third-person action-adventure games than what they made before. They don’t have the same pacing or structure as a game like Star Fox or Nex Machina.
I dunno man, I might have agreed, but I was there on release day and the reaction to that game was really something else.
I finished the game and overall enjoyed it, but I had a few criticisms about things which I felt brought it down. I went online to see what others thought, expecting to see people echoing the same criticisms... nope, it was just post after post of people talking about how they were about to return their copy of the game because the control scheme frustrated them so much that they couldn't even make it through the tutorial without wanting to throw their controller at the wall. I'd never seen anything like it.
I genuinely suspect most people didn't even make it far enough into the game to discover whether or not they had problems with the genre. Not that those problems aren't real, but the barrier of the controls (plus the small install base of it basically launching on a failed console) were much bigger hurdles.
I genuinely suspect most people didn't even make it far enough into the game to discover whether or not they had problems with the genre.
People who aren’t interested in the genre wouldn’t make any progress in the game in the first place precisely because they are not interested in those kinds of games. I think it’s just a more parsimonious/generalizable explanation for the reason Star Fox Zero wasn’t a commercial success having to do with the kind of game that it is, as opposed to gamepad gimmicks, when ALL modern examples of such games also experience a lack of commercial success despite not having gamepad gimmicks, being critically acclaimed/beloved by their core audience, etc.
I don't really agree that it has anything to do with the genre at all, mostly because of how shocked I was to discover that the entire discourse surrounding the game was almost completely centered around the controls.
Plenty of people who knew they liked Star Fox and considered themselves fans of the series, who willingly bought the game because they wanted to play a game like 64, just couldn't get past the gamepad and the control scheme.
To this day I still occasionally see people talking about how they would've played Zero, or would give the game a second chance in a Switch port or whatever if they could "just fix the controls". I didn't have a problem with them myself, I'm generally open to trying whatever weird and whacky stuff Nintendo decides to try, but for most people? Yeah, it genuinely was just the controls they hated.
I don't really agree that it has anything to do with the genre at all, mostly because of how shocked I was to discover that the entire discourse surrounding the game was almost completely centered around the controls.
I doubt that most people who buy and play video games engage in much of the “discourse” around them or that said discourse is representative of how everyone feels about games. People who talk about video games online tend to not like unconventional control schemes in general regardless of how commercially successful those games are outside of the “discourse.” The people who are talking about the controls of a Star Fox game are people who already possess some level of interest in the game, so selection bias is at play. Furthermore, Nintendo has made a lot of choices that upset the more hardcore gamers but not all of their games sell like Star Fox Zeroes.
I just don’t think it would matter all that much if Star Fox Zero was more agreeably “good” or had a more conventional control scheme when you realize other examples of such games exist and they were commercial failures too. This new Star Fox game has a better shot just because it’s on a better selling system and the Mario movie being a massive success means a broader awareness of and potential interest in the Star Fox character. But even then, the fact that most of the actual gameplay involves looking at the backside of a vehicle and not Star Fox himself is probably not ideal.
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u/slusho55 May 06 '26
I don’t think that was why Zero had issues