Ultimately, I think that the era of Mario fangames is coming to a close; or at least, THIS era of Mario fangames is coming to a close. It's sad, but it was kind of inevitable, in a way, and a lot of factors lead up to it.
The elephant in the room, of course, is Nintendo's recent legal frenzy. I'm guessing that Iwata had been working behind the scenes to keep the lawyers on a bit of a chain for the sake of the long-term fandom and community, because as soon as he died, Nintendo started shutting down (or attempting to shut down) a great number of big in-development fangames. Let's face it; nobody wants to spend a year or more working on a game that could very well just get blasted into oblivion by a bloodthirsty legal team.
Most of us are old and experienced enough to start working on our own for-profit indie projects by now. And why wouldn't we do so? It's the perfect way to fulfill our deepest artistic desires while also maybe picking up a bit of dough (which, hey, we need to start worrying about accumulating now; we're adults, or nearly adults, after all,) and there's never been a better time than now to do it. Heck, I was already getting bitten by the indie bug a few years back or so, when I was halfway through making Bowser in the Horrible Nightmare, which is probably why the game started being less and less like a Mario game as time went on.
We, as a community, have already made a ton of Mario fangames. And in spite of how many small innovations we may have made when it comes to gameplay mechanics, graphic design, level design, and world building, most of them are still Mario games, in word and in deed. I mean, forget about the New Super Mario Bros. series; MFGG has exhausted the basic Mario formula in ways and on levels that Nintendo has never even realized that it could be exhausted before! How much can be done with a Mario game, that nobody on here has done yet, without making it something other than a Mario game? Not a whole lot. The only real way to make a fangame stand out by this point is to go bigger, but for the above two reasons, that's becoming less and less desirable (and practical) by the day.
If Mario fangames ever make a bigtime comeback, it's going to be after a hiatus and at the hands of the next generation of Mario fans.
Ultimately, I think that the era of Mario fangames is coming to a close; or at least, THIS era of Mario fangames is coming to a close. It's sad, but it was kind of inevitable, in a way, and a lot of factors lead up to it.
The elephant in the room, of course, is Nintendo's recent legal frenzy. I'm guessing that Iwata had been working behind the scenes to keep the lawyers on a bit of a chain for the sake of the long-term fandom and community, because as soon as he died, Nintendo started shutting down (or attempting to shut down) a great number of big in-development fangames. Let's face it; nobody wants to spend a year or more working on a game that could very well just get blasted into oblivion by a bloodthirsty legal team.
Most of us are old and experienced enough to start working on our own for-profit indie projects by now. And why wouldn't we do so? It's the perfect way to fulfill our deepest artistic desires while also maybe picking up a bit of dough (which, hey, we need to start worrying about accumulating now; we're adults, or nearly adults, after all,) and there's never been a better time than now to do it. Heck, I was already getting bitten by the indie bug a few years back or so, when I was halfway through making Bowser in the Horrible Nightmare, which is probably why the game started being less and less like a Mario game as time went on.
We, as a community, have already made a ton of Mario fangames. And in spite of how many small innovations we may have made when it comes to gameplay mechanics, graphic design, level design, and world building, most of them are still Mario games, in word and in deed. I mean, forget about the New Super Mario Bros. series; MFGG has exhausted the basic Mario formula in ways and on levels that Nintendo has never even realized that it could be exhausted before! How much can be done with a Mario game, that nobody on here has done yet, without making it something other than a Mario game? Not a whole lot. The only real way to make a fangame stand out by this point is to go bigger, but for the above two reasons, that's becoming less and less desirable (and practical) by the day.
If Mario fangames ever make a bigtime comeback, it's going to be after a hiatus and at the hands of the next generation of Mario fans.
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Most people don't think that they're always right, they just think that people who disagree with them are always wrong. |
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