I am curious why Nintendo funded and is publishing this. They can't think that its going to be a huge seller.
I think that, for a broad variety of reasons, Nintendo is outside what I shall call the Cool Kids Club in the gaming universe.
The Cool Kids Club is
loosely associated with sales (games like GTA are in this club, as is Elder Scrolls) but is not entirely dictated by it (games like Bioshock are definitely in this club, even though it's not an enormous seller).
If you consider it, think of all the influential developers in the medium -- the ones who other developers want to follow, and look up to. While we can quibble about a few names, I suspect most would agree the list includes names like Valve, Kojima, Rockstar, Irrational, Bethesda, Blizzard, Naughty Dog.
Nintendo hasn't gotten a real effort from any of these leaders of the Cool Kids Club for a long, long time. Despite their massive success with the Wii, they never got a game from Ken Levine, or the Houser Brothers, or from Epic. They never got a game from Bethesda, either. Or Valve. Or Square's Final Fantasy team, even, despite their relative decline of status in this club.
That is what they need to change. It is these few development houses that
other lesser known developers look up to; Nintendo needs to find a way to get these developers on board, because pretty much the entirety of the "core" audience is led by these dozen or so developers. Where they go, others will follow.
Platinum is not Valve, or Rockstar, but they're on the periphery of this trend setting, Cool-Kids-Club group. That is my position on the issue.