Pikmin Hasn't Sold Well Because Players Find It Too Difficult, Says Miyamoto
Shigeru Miyamoto reflects on the relatively poorer sales of the Pikmin series, at least when compared to other Nintendo properties. Speaking as the most recent instalment, Pikmin 4, launches on Switch, Miyamoto suggests that previous titles haven't sold as well as hoped because Nintendo's audience finds them too difficult. Miyamoto hypothesises that much of this difficulty stems from the fact that it's easy for Pikmin to die, but defends the decision to include this anyway, saying that this "relationship with mortality" is key to Pikmin's message. He also shares that the controls may have been too complicated in previous games, something he had hoped to address in this long-awaited sequel. “There have been three games in the series until now, from Pikmin to Pikmin 3," says Miyamoto, speaking ahead of Pikmin 4's launch (thanks, VGC). "Personally I’ve always wondered, ‘Why haven’t they exploded more in sales even though they’re so much fun to play? Why do people think they’re so difficult?’
"I get that people find it more difficult when death is a factor. But I think the franchise's strength lies in its relationship with mortality. If something is irreversible, you need to figure out a way to prevent undesired things from happening." Despite the constant threat of death hanging over the players in Pikmin, Miyamoto cites the controls as one of the more major issues. "I think people find Pikmin difficult for two reasons: the controls and the depth of gameplay. I spent a long time mulling over how we could convey these points as 'interesting' rather than 'difficult'." "The first game provided a deeper challenge, while the second game was broader in terms of content, and we went back to something closer to the first one in Pikmin 3," he explains. "But after thinking about it, I realized that we could do both."
I can understand most of the changes-- frankly, selling it as an adventure with cute animals and people and a dog as a partner is a better sales point than as a lite-rts with a good amount of death on a console. The missus likes Pikmin 4 after not really getting the appeal. And last I checked, the new one has just about tripled the sales of the game, if the Japanese numbers are anything to go by.
What was most disappointing to me was making it so that instead of having a separate campaign mode, challenge mode and vs mode; the game rolls it all into the main story (with a new addition of what amounts to a tower defense mode). It makes the whole thing feel like a series of mini games set in the Pikmin world. It's still a cute world but its nature is no longer red in tooth and claw. I guess marching the player through the different modes was supposed to be the transition from having a "difficult" game to an "interesting" one.
