Putting Megaman in there doesn't make much sense, the last proper megaman game was donkey's ago and it's practically (or is literally) dead and has been for a long time, the last thing to do with megaman was japanese only re-releases of 1,2 and 3 on the DS; from 1987-1998 there were 9 Megaman titles (11 if you count the arcade titles), that's 1 every 1.22 years.st0pnsw0p said:
I wasn't trying to say that none of this is bad, I was trying to point out that Nintendo seemingly seems to be the only one constantly criticized for it, and they are actually not the worst offender.
Even Super Mario, by your numbers, is averaged outside the "annual release" window. There are companies out there who openly tout their yearly releases and rarely ever do they get dumped on for it. Sure, there is some occasional banter about the "new" CoD, but it mostly goes unnoticed and unheard, but the second Nintendo releases any game that has even a similar premise to something they've made before it is like the worst thing that could ever happen to the industry and Nintendo should just die.
Companies do yearly franchises because they continue to sell well, Nintendo releases titles (sometimes with slightly longer than a 1 year gap, and other times with several years to more than 5 years between titles) because they sell well, and are good games.
It's not like Nintendo are pumping out crap all the time either, every first party Nintendo title in recent memory has received favourable reviews (from both critics, and consumers), and have sold well. The last 4 New Super Mario Bros games have metacritic scores of 89, 87, 78, 84 respectively. The last 4 main series CoD games (I didn't include the horribly rated iOS games or the Vita title) have metacritic scores of 78, 74, 68, 78 (these numbers fluctuate between platforms, even if I picked the most favourable metascore from each game they would not match the numbers of NSMB).
If you release a game, and it gets an 89 critic score, and an 8.5 user score, why in the hell would you not release another game in that series? The next of which came 2 and a half years later and got similar ratings/reviews.
I, too, would like to see more from Nintendo, like back in the Gamecube days with Baten Kaitos, Geist, Custom Robo etc, and they are bringing some new stuff to the table soon, but that doesn't mean they should stop doing what is actually working. We have already established that Nintendo aren't in trouble, maybe if they were on their 5th straight year of $1Bn+ losses we could say that it isn't working, but they are already back in profit, it works, the people want these games. Nintendo is not the worst offender, and they cannot even be mathematically put into a "annual release" camp like just about every big AAA company is at the moment (with some exceptions).
TL;DR I just really, really, really do not think that the criticism Nintendo gets is in any way justified, considering all the companies getting a free ride on said criticism for often doing a lot worse than Nintendo is accused of.
