 So a question I've had, I've been really pondering this all week as we're on the eve of Pikmin 4 coming out, right? Technically Pikmin 4 comes out tonight for those of us with digital versions here in the United States for some of you guys, the digital version is already active in other parts of the world. So some people are already playing Pikmin 4 right now. For those of you pirates out there, you might've been playing Pikmin 4 since Monday. So yeah, Pikmin 4 is a thing that exists. The physical versions come out tomorrow and I am very, very excited for Pikmin 4. Seriously, I really am excited. There's a lot of reasons to be excited about this game because Pikmin is an amazing franchise. If you don't believe me, all you have to do is look at the reviews. I mean, look at this, look at this. This is Pikmin 4 and 88. Now we don't have user scores for this yet, but this is like really consistently quality. Look at this, Pikmin 3 on the Wii U has an 87 meta score, but look at this, 808 user ratings added 8.8. So the users are backing up the review score. And then we see this Pikmin 2 back on GameCube. Look at this, a 90 meta score, 240 ratings, 9.1 user score. And then you get to the original Pikmin back on GameCube and you're seeing an 89 and then 226 ratings with an 87 or an 8.7. So the bottom line is that the review scores are backing up this game. It is a quality experience. Now, this isn't the first time we've seen quality games get really good review scores. We haven't seen this with things like Xenobank Chronicles. One, two, three and X all have amazing review scores but don't seem to for various reasons be able to hit on a big market. But the question on Pikmin sales has really come up because Shigeru Miyamoto himself in a developer Q&A that Nintendo did really had this question come to his mind. He's been wondering, why can't they get Pikmin to sell even like Kirby and the Forgotten Land numbers? Hell, it can't even sell Metroid Dread which is like right at 3 million. Why can't they get Pikmin to appeal to people? Why can't they get it to sell? And as a question I've been pondering as we enter into the launch of Pikmin 4 and I've realized I have not made a single Pikmin 4 video on my channel at all, not at all. Heck, I had videos on Pikmin 3 Deluxe and I actually already paid for Pikmin 4. I bought one of those Game Passes, those $99 vouchers that I got Tears of the Kingdom digital and I got Pikmin 4. I knew I wanted Pikmin 4 back then before Tears of the Kingdom even came out and I'm really looking forward to playing Pikmin 4 tonight. So why then? Why? Why? Does Pikmin not sell? We had a conversation about this on the podcast yesterday featuring Andres restarting my best friend Eric Moore. If you guys want to go check out that more in depth conversation I definitely suggest you go do that and I'll put a link to it down in the description because I really do believe in the conversation we were having but we couldn't really come to a conclusion on why Pikmin just doesn't sell. And one thing that Eric brought up who is massively on the outside and I love having this perspective at times because I'm someone who's, I'm deeply ingrained in Nintendo. I haven't played Pikmin since Gamecube. He's somebody that, you know what? He only buys games if he's pretty sure he's gonna play them and even then he will occasionally buy a game he plans to play that for whatever reason he doesn't. Example, Eric bought Skyward Sword HD and hasn't even launched the game. So as a more general consumer, Eric looked at trailers of Pikmin 4 and he just said, it looks like a kid's game and I don't know what this game is. It made me realize something about Pikmin is that the more unique a game is, a more, there's nothing like Pikmin out there. Let's just be honest. There really is no other game like Pikmin. Like when I think about Pikmin and I go, man, what other games can I compare Pikmin to? There's none that come to mind. It's slow paced. It's very strategy oriented. There's some adventuring happening. Obviously with all the various Pikmin, the highly detailed world, there's so much going on. Miyamoto thinks Pikmin doesn't sell because it's too difficult. It's too complicated for general consumers to figure out. So they wanted to streamline it a bit more with Pikmin 4 but also still keep someone that difficulty in that Pikmin lovers are accustomed to. They don't wanna upset the core audience but they wanna try to expand the audience with Pikmin 4. This is Miyamoto's own words. In fact, he mentioned that they've done things specifically to do that. And if you've played the Pikmin 4 demo, you already know some of those things that they have done, especially if you're already a Pikmin fan. As an example, sometimes the camera angle comes back to not quite over the shoulder but something that's more third person action oriented. And that is something that obviously has a pretty good appeal given how many games like that exist in sell really, really well. Hello, tears of the kingdom, right? So they've done that. They've added the dog in, not just because people love dogs but because it takes a little bit of the tedium away from certain aspects of the game. Like having to cross water with Pikmin that can't be in water and making that easier. Maybe making some jumps, upsteps and other things. A bit less annoying and tedious than it was in prior games. Easing and streamlining some of the ways that Pikmin works. And yet there are difficult moments in that Pikmin 4 demo. And as we've seen with some people live streaming Pikmin 4 today, there's difficult moments all throughout it because the bottom line is Pikmin is a difficult series. It's always had difficulty involved because it's a strategy style adventure game. So why can't they get it to sell? I think that because Pikmin is so unique, it's very hard to communicate what the game is. I, we came up with a few ideas on the podcast last night on how they could potentially overcome some of this stuff. One of my favorites was really a trailer concept that Andres Restart came up with. You guys should go again, check out our podcast where he goes really in depth on this trailer concept he comes up with that I think would be a pretty good viral marketing campaign. But I also think they could have overcome it with something like a TikTok viral marketing campaign. Something that happened more recently came to mind when talking about this because there's other things out there that are a popular brand but a certain part of that brand may not be that big. Grimace, yeah, you guys might know who he is right now. Some of you guys might know who he is for a long time but to say that he's been a popular recognizable character for McDonald's for a long time would be an overstatement. He's been around for a long time but my children had no idea who Grimace was. It's from a bygone era of, you know McDonald commercials and toys but they decided to celebrate Grimace's birthday not too long ago because of course a made up character has a birthday and they created the Grimace meals which were just like, I believe it was a quarter pounder meal or a, what was it there, Big Mac meal but you could get a colored shake with it, a new flavor of shake. Basically a vanilla shake with some berry flavoring in it that caused it to be purple and there's not a lot of purple shakes out there and this turned out to be absolutely brilliant for many aspects. One, you could only get the shake by buying a meal so this would increase sales at McDonald's where some people that just wanna try the shake are spending more money on things they maybe don't even want but it increases the bottom line for McDonald's and also because the Grimace shake had this unique purple color to it combined with that character, it turned into this thing where people were memeing it all over and it became a viral sensation for over a week talking about Grimace's birthday and the Grimace shake. Now people were doing silly things with it and all this stuff but it was a massively successful viral marketing campaign for something that is not really that well understood who the hell Grimace is and something that is still tied to a popular brand. Nintendo is a popular brand. The Nintendo Switch is a popular system but the Pikmin brand isn't. So I felt like there is something that could be done from a viral marketing perspective that could have created extra hype for Pikmin 4. What that something is, I don't know, I don't have the creative mind for these sorts of commercials. If I did have those creative minds I'd be on a completely different path. I always thought, you know, if I had the creativity to come up with these amazing marketing campaigns, I would just be a marketer working for a marketing firm or working at some big company sort of like when Reggie Fisame was at Pizza Hut and he came up with the big foot pizza idea. If I had ideas and creative ideas like that I would just be in a different career path. But I'm not. I'm somebody who talks about video game news on the internet as a career because it's something I'm passionate about and I care about but also doesn't require extreme creativity to come up with topics. Even this topic of this video right here I can't even take credit for coming up with it. I didn't know that's where this conversation was gonna go when we were talking about Miyamoto's quotes yesterday and Andres Restor was the one that's like, dude, you should just make a video. It's interesting when we're talking about Pikmin and what they can do to make this game appeal to more people. I don't think there's anything with the gameplay. You know, Miyamoto thinks it's the game. I don't think it's the gameplay. I think it's just getting people to understand what this game is. This isn't Mario and Zelda. Metroid, there's no fast-paced, high-action-oriented aspects to Pikmin. It's a slow game. So how do you get people to understand in a 30-second commercial a slow game? I don't know. I'll just restart my now. So what I want you guys to do is go down below and tell me why you think Pikmin can't seem to take off. Look, we could have had the same video about many of Nintendo's IPs. We could have talked about Xenobit Chronicles and why can't they seem to get that to get to the next steps, except Xenobit Chronicles has been showing growth. Each new entry has been selling more and more and more and Xenobit Chronicles 3 is on pace to be the best-selling one. So that might be a non-issue there as the series continues to grow, but Pikmin hasn't done that. So what can they do? We could have talked about this with Kirby. Kirby always selling a couple million, but then Forgotten Land came out and smashed the records for Kirby sales. Nintendo seems to be able to find ways to get other IPs over time to increase in sales. So why can't they do it with Pikmin? And will Pikmin 4 be the best-selling one? It's only got to sell like two and a half million to become the best-selling Pikmin game. And while that's a lot of copies sold, Miyamoto made it sound like they want this to be a five million plus seller. How can they do that? Will Pikmin 4 get there? And will this become a moot point three weeks from now when we get some sales data in for Pikmin 4? You guys let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. Let me know if you're planning to pick up Pikmin 4 and I'll catch you in the next video.