[mynameisvlad]

> My point is that a million makers on a million joycons couldn't generate enough commercially viable content for a single game.

How does this criticism follow after seeing a playlist full of creative uses of the limited systems available?

What do you expect, these individual makers using a proprietary tool somehow actually making a commercially viable game out of their levels that they can't even export and are entirely based on the closed source engine powering SMM? That never would have happened because of the nature of the platform, not the content being made.

[a13o]

Nintendo released SMM knowing it wouldn't be a direct threat to the Mario franchise. They were able to guarantee this because they know a Mario game with 80 levels needs 80 things we've never seen before. SMM ships with 200 things we've definitely seen before.

It's possible that some combination of those things is new, and good for a level worth of content. But there isn't 80 of them. The playlist has stuff like invisible pipes, lag spike inducers, soft lock strategies, etc. This style of troll design is popular(?) within the SMM community but you wouldn't sell a million copies of it in its own game.

[mynameisvlad]

> Nintendo released SMM knowing it wouldn't be a direct threat to the Mario franchise.

Sure, that would certainly be a good pro albeit hardly the sole reason as you're making it out to be.

> They were able to guarantee this because they know a Mario game with 80 levels needs 80 things we've never seen before. SMM ships with 200 things we've definitely seen before.

That just plain does not follow. You can do millions of things with those 200 things, and combinations of those 200 things have certainly never been seen in a Mario game.

The playlist has 117 videos. This only scratches the surface of what is possible in SMM.

They are insanely challenging and certainly introduce new mechanics, which is your entire premise, that levels need gimmicks. There are levels that literally take hours due to how complex and new they are. They do things that Nintendo never intended you to do and could easily fill multiple games' worth.

Have you actually tried it out? Played some of these creative levels? Because everything you say makes me believe you have never even opened SMM let alone looked at the levels out there. There are literally tens of thousands of videos showing off thousands of new mechanics built on top of those standard widgets, in tens of thousands of hard levels. Your description of what is out there is just, plain and simple, not reality.

Just because it's not physically possible to make a commercially viable game due to the nature of the platform does not mean that there isn't enough content (and then some) out there made by a million joycons. If a person can make it, an AI can eventually figure it out.

[a13o]

I've played it and also watch it often on Twitch. You can go hours without seeing a decent level. What the SMM community thinks is playable content is very far off what commercially viable content would be. Shell bounces, abusing physics with bouncy blocks, leaps of faith, "be small Mario on purpose"; are all unshippable content, fun only to folks who have accepted the constraints of SMM.

The latest Mario lets you throw your hat to control other characters and there are dozens of mechanics born from that interaction alone, each one unlike the other. SMM has no hope of ever competing with that.

[mynameisvlad]

Comparing a 2D platforme to a 3D one is like apples and oranges.

They serve entirely different purposes and have different constraints, the biggest one being an entire dimension. Odyssey's mechanic would be extremely dull in a 2D platformer.

Your opinion is also just that, an opinion. Of one person. Just because you don't find it entertaining or think it's worthy of a game doesn't make it fact.

It being relatively popular on Twitch, enough for you even to watch it, is testament in itself that there is clearly interest in the levels that are being created and playing them, which in itself proves the viability of the levels. If they were anywhere near as dull, repetitive and lacking due to the constraints of SMM as you claim them to be, people wouldn't be streaming or watching them.

[a13o]

The 2D/3D aspect is so irrelevant. I could have chosen New Super Mario Bros U and talked about riding on the back of dragons, micro mushrooms, ice flowers. SMM2 could add these mechanics but they by definition aren't novel and combining them will not generate novel content likely to be in the next ~two dimensional~~ Mario game. That game will have a bunch of stuff never seen in any game before.

SMM is not a flop and I never claimed it is. But if the levels are so good, why doesn't anyone sell them and make Mario brother money? Because SMM levels are the 2nd slice of cake.

[mynameisvlad]

> The 2D/3D aspect is so irrelevant

I mean your entire premise is that some flashy new mechanic is what's holding SMM back, and you chose a shit example and I called you out on it. That's hardly irrelevant. Inconvenient for you, maybe. Next time, don't choose such a bad example as your only point. You've done it twice already in this thread, first with SMM itself.

> But if the levels are so good, why doesn't anyone sell them and make Mario brother money? Because SMM levels are the 2nd slice of cake.

No, it's literally because there is absolutely no platform for exporting or selling the levels. They are levels based entirely on the engine of SMM. They can only be played within SMM. Even if you were to take the elements and reproduce them in another engine, it won't work the same because it's based on the timings of SMM.

I already said as much. There not being a platform to sell these things does not mean they don't have value. If it were possible, the best levels would most certainly be good enough for a full game.

Just because there's no riding on the back of a dinosaur does not mean the combination of mechanics in new ways isn't itself a novel mechanic. You're discarding it because it isn't some flashy first party thing. People have done crazy things within the confines of SMM and throwing it all away because Mario isn't throwing his hat onto an enemy or having a new power up available is absurd.