BAYONETTA BAYONETTA BAYONETTA

Much as I love Sony and Nintendo, I would never want Bayonetta to end up entirely in their hands.
It's a great series because of the team behind it, after all.
Just like no one can do Zelda like Nintendo, no one can do Bayonetta like Platinum.^_-

It's true that they did a Direct for Wonderful 101 (and a quite lenghty and awesome one at that) but, that aside, they didn't really do much more for the game, marketing wise.

Which is a shame, because it's my favorite game of all time. :(

Nintendo did promote TW101 in a variety of ways. It was taken to practically every major industry event between June 2012 - Sept 2013. That includes events such as GDC (but not in 2012), Pax East, Pax Prime, E3, Comic-Con, Japan Expo,Gamescom, Wondercon, and Tokyo Game Show. In addition, Nintendo held a few of its own separate events like mall tours as well as 2012's Club Nintendo invitational Wii U experience tour. Furthermore, TW101 was promoted through a weekly NOA twitter campaign, online ads, interviews with the developer,game previews, Platinum Games blog updates, a 1st party downloadable demo (I think the only one Wii U's had). Lastly, TW101 also was featured in several Nintendo Direct videos as you mentioned, including one hosted by the game's director.

Now, the game apparently didn't get much magazine exposure, and Nintendo of America didn't give it a TV ad because it had spent most of its budget on 3DS televised ads, leaving only a few Wii U games with TV ads such as Pikmin 3, Super Mario 3D World and around two generalized ads (one of which briefly featured Wind Waker HD) for the holiday season.

Quite frankly, I think Wonderful 101 would have been a hard to sell on any other home console because it is a fairly obscure,unconventional, over the top and deceptively challenging action game. According the game's director, he complained that retailers weren't promoting it in their stores because they didn't understand what kind of game it was. I think part of the problem was taking the risk in making that kind of game in the first place. It doesn't have mainstream appeal and it isn't a traditional action game, so its uniqueness was both a strength and a weakness for it. Even when a game has a TV ad, there is no guarantee it will sell well. In fact, Bayonetta 1 still didn't meet to Sega and Platinum's sales expectations which is pretty much why the sequel was initially cancelled by Sega in 2011. The reality is that Platinum's titles are mostly poor sellers even in Japan.

As for Bayonetta 2, it has several factors working against it. Europe isn't showing must interest in Wii U, so it can't be counted on to contribute much to Bayonetta 2's sales. In Japan, the home console market is in bad shape. Not even flagship releases such as Mario Kart 8, were able to make a substantial boost in hardware sales and its software sales are only at 650k as of last week. Hyrule Warriors performed a bit better than most other Dyansty Warrior games but like Mario KArt 8, it failed to do much to drive hardwre sales and its software sales took a nose dive in its second and third week of release. Bayonetta 2 will likely perform similarly despite likely strong reviews and the freebie inclusion of Bayonetta 1.

North America is the only other market Bayonetta 2 can rely on, but there's steep competition from all other platforms, and the release of new software will naturally be at its highest come the holiday season. It definitely won't be in the top 5 NPD chart and probably not even in the top 10 either since there's other games that will likely outsell it due to being cross-gen multiplatform. The first Bayonetta game didn't appear on the top 10 for NPD in North America when it released in January 2010, but it did end up reaching a 1.1 million copies before the end of February for worldwide sales I don't think Bayonetta 2 will be able to sell as much in that amount of time.

Anyway, Wonderful 101 is definitely an underrated title and Bayonetta 2 looks like it is shaping up to be even better than the first title. Hopefully, people will support it, otherwise we may not see a potential Bayonetta 3 published by Nintendo.

"Lost billions" = were forced to stop ripping off the USA by a matter of billions 💵