Why Sony's Attempt at a Mascot Brawler Failed

I've recently been covering the presumed death of PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, a concept that's bewildering due to Nintendo's constant success with its Super Smash Bros. franchise. You'd have to be under a rock to not at least pick up and play a version of SSB for a couple rounds, but not many have even heard of Sony's mascot brawler.

Paul Tassi of Forbes had a great editorial on how Sony botched its attempt at creating a massive selling first party game. Indeed, the PS All-Stars never lived up to what it could have been, and it's largely in thanks to being silently released on the back-end of PlayStation 3's life cycle.

The sales were completely in the tank. Just looking at the numbers are jaw-dropping.

The game was a relative disaster when it should have been a crown jewel in PlayStation’s exclusive line-up. It sold 0.5M copies to Smash Bros. Brawl’s 11M+ on the Wii. Obviously a first run at a PlayStation Smash Bros. wouldn’t unseat the champ, but the battle wasn’t even close.

PlayStation All-Stars was generally the same game as SSB, with the exception of finishing off enemies. I've already talked about how much I dislike the system; killing off players by building up an meter with three different levels of attack just isn't fun. Think about if someone turned the settings to "very high" item appearances with just smash balls. It completely sucks the fun out of what the SSB franchise brought when it comes to knocking enemies out of the arena.

That's why this game failed to appeal to gamers and sell. Nintendo owns the world in four players gathering together for offline multiplayer gaming, and neither Sony nor Microsoft have captured that crowd.

This isn't a genre that translates well for online play, and SSB: Brawl showed that convincingly.

Despite the effort, Tassi hits the nail on the head when it comes to the future of PlayStation All-Stars. Like Sony's other ventures, this one will be completely forgotten a year from now.

I don’t know if the PS All-Stars name or concept can be salvaged. The game was such a let down I’m not sure Sony would waste resources reworking the concept for the PS4, and I don’t know if fans would take the same bait twice after the first game failed to live up to its massive potential.

[Source: Forbes]
[Image credit: Flickr/Community Mag]