 Hey everyone, welcome back to Nintendo Prime, and you see we're not on our typical set right now because this is just gonna be sort of a discussion topic that does have a little bit of news in it. We do have a new story in here about Nintendo's fall slash holiday lineup, a new entry into that lineup that sort of rounds out what Nintendo's holiday lineup's going to be. This news is really, really cool and basically replaces what Breath of the Wild 2 was. This also makes me feel like maybe there's not gonna be a ton more announcements for 2022 from Nintendo, although there could be some surprises up their sleeves. You could still see some sort of Zelda announcement, maybe a Metroid announcement. Something could happen. Who knows? Maybe another Mario game gets announced. I don't know everything going on at Nintendo, but this is just stuff that seems to round out what Nintendo's holiday plans are going to be. And if this is the first time you've ever seen a Nintendo Prime video, I would appreciate a like, a subscribe, all of that as we're on our road to 80,000 subscribers. I do appreciate every single one of you. Now, I got this information from the Nate the Hate podcast that he does with Modern Vintage Gamer, who's a video game developer, works for limited run games and other studios. Does bring games over to Switch, of course. And Nate the Hate has known to have industry connections and everything. He's talked in the past about some of these connections. I'm not gonna go into all the details. Sometimes this information's correct. Sometimes it's not. I know a lot of you have not forgiven for talking about how Switch Pro was gonna be eminently announced last year. And then after like a day, he started going back on that. And it was kind of a hot mess. We all know the Switch Pro situation. I think a lot of industry insiders did not handle it correctly last year. And then obviously a lot of YouTubers like us, kind of sitting here taking the brunt force blowback from a lot of fans because, you know, hey, we rely on these insiders for this information. But he did get other stuff, correct recently, including the Gen 9 Pokemon announcements. And so, you know, it's always hit or miss with these people that have connections. But one thing he did talk about on his podcast, probably the only piece of news you can glean out of this week's episode was, well, huh, Mario plus Rabbids, Sparks of Hope. So this game, you know, is slotted to come out this year. That is the last time we really saw this was back at E3 last year. Ubisoft talked about it. Nintendo showed a little bit of it. And that's really it. We haven't really heard much about it since. And a lot of people kind of assumed that maybe this game could get delayed out of this year since we haven't heard anything about it. But it does appear, at least according to Nate the Hate, that this is going to be their big holiday game packaged together with Pokemon Generation 9. So Scarlet and Violet are naturally the lead sales getter, but Nintendo does view as those Ubisoft Sparks of Hope as a major title for the holiday period. And you might go, but Nate, come on now. This is a spin-off Mario crossover franchise. How could this possibly replace Breath of the Wild 2? It can't, at least not long haul. Breath of the Wild 2 is obviously gonna be probably a evergreen title that's gonna sell millions upon millions upon millions for years, even cross generations into the next platform. But what we can say about Mario plus Rabbids, Sparks of Hope, is that Mario plus Rabbids, the original game, sold nine million copies, nine million. Yeah, that's a pretty big seller. That's Monster Hunter Rise levels of sales. So clearly they know that this IP has a lot of sales potential and it could actually slot in very well for the holiday. So the idea basically is that Nintendo's holiday is gonna shape up like this. It was in a way Chronicles 3 in September, Bayonetta 3 in October, Pokemon, Scarlet and Violet in November, and then rounding out with Sparks of Hope either in early November or in early December. So that seems to be what Nintendo is slotting for their holiday. And when you think about that lineup, that's a really solid lineup. You have two big games that are gonna do big numbers, right? Pokemon, Scarlet and Violet, obviously is gonna do the biggest numbers. And then you're gonna see obviously Sparks of Hope is gonna do really, really good numbers as well, especially at launch. I could see it having a three, four, five million, you know, unit launch. And then obviously you have the niche, the hardcore, the faithful that you always wanna appease with Xenobrid Chronicles 3 and Bayonetta 3. Those two games obviously aren't gonna sell like Sparks of Hope or sell like Pokemon, but they could move two, three, four, maybe five million units in totality, not necessarily at launch. And that's obviously gonna help push things for the Switch heading into the holiday season. And that gives Nintendo a really solid slate of fall slash holiday games. And obviously we all know, well, hey, something on March, April sometime in early next year, we're gonna be getting Breath of Wild 2. There's probably gonna be some other port or something else landing in January. Nintendo's actually got things lined up fairly well for that period of the year. The times we don't really know about are basically July and August. Those are kind of the two months where we're kind of like, okay, what's Nintendo gonna do? Splatoon 3 is landing at some point. We know that. So yeah, I'm honestly thinking that Nintendo is looking just fine for this holiday period. Now, does this mean the rest of 2022 looks as good as say 2019, 2017? There's a lot of debate, by the way, over which was the bigger year, 2017 or 2019? 2019 technically had more exclusive games released. 2017, obviously they'll had Zelda, Mario and Splatoon. And then some people like to throw Mario Kart in that mix. So that ends up being a really, really big year of heavy hitters, whereas 2019 was more of the wave of games that aren't quite as popular, but still really important, besides obviously Sword and Shield. Obviously that's a big deal, but besides that, it's more so, okay, well you had Breath of the Wild, while we have Link's Awakening, right? Oh, well you had this, yeah, well we had Luigi's Mansion 3. So yeah, it's obviously a big debate over which year people prefer for Switch. Some people, by the way I've heard, actually argue 2018 is the king because the only game they care about is Smash, and some people only care about, well, you know, Animal Crossing. So yeah, it's gonna kind of depend on what matters most to you, because a lot, I mean, if we're just honest, just being completely honest, there are a lot of gamers that really only play a handful of games per generation. That's just reality. Maybe it's because of time, maybe it's because of the kind of game they play. You know, when you're playing the Animal Crossings of the Worlds, of Fortnite's of the Worlds, of Splatoons, of Call of Duty's, when you're playing these kind of never ending games, that can kind of become what you play a majority of the time. So yeah, it kind of leads to you maybe not necessarily playing as many games as, I don't know, I don't want to toot my own horn, but maybe it's I do. I actually play a wide swath of video games every single year. I don't beat them all, and I don't necessarily play the multiplayer games months and months and months on end. As an example, last time I played Super Mario Superstars was I guess with my kids maybe a couple of weeks ago, and then before that, I was with you guys on live stream last year, earlier this year. I don't really play it that much, because I don't have a desire to, although I do have a lot of fun with it when I do play. So yeah, I honestly think that Nintendo has actually slotted very, very well for this year. Obviously we can look forward to 2023, where you can expect things like that new Zelda game, maybe a brand new 3D Mario game. I know some people might be thinking Odyssey 2. I'm thinking it's just some sort of 3D Mario game. I think the boat has sort of sailed on Odyssey 2. Maybe I'm wrong on that. Maybe that's exactly what we're going to get, but I personally think we have actually kind of seen that they're moving on to a different idea, a different concept, and Bowser's Fury might be more the style of Mario game we can maybe look forward to. Maybe that was just a one-off idea, and we never see it come back. We still have obviously Metroid Prime 4 at some point. We still hope it's gonna come out this generation. Obviously we have a lot of concerns about the development. At least I have concerns about the development of it. Maybe you don't, but I do in whether or not it's gonna land this generation. Maybe Twilight Princess and Winner HD at some point. We keep wondering why these games haven't been imported already. So I don't know. You guys let me know what you think of Sparks of Hope landing this holiday period. Do you think this is a great filling game? I know some of you guys might not even be interested in the game, but for me, I know I'm interested in it. And I know Eric from the Nintendo Prime Podcast, my best buddy. It's one of his most highly anticipated games of the year. He loved the original, beat the original, and is really looking forward to the next one. As am I, because damn, damn, if Mario Plus Rabbids is not legitimately a great game and hopefully a great franchise. Can't call it that yet until we put it in the second one if that's really good. Then I can start to say, this is a pretty damn good IP, a pretty damn good franchise. So anyway, folks, I am Nathaniel Rumpeljantz from Nintendo Prime. I wanna thank you for joining me today and I will catch you in the next video.