It looks like Ubisoft should've held off on a Mario + Rabbids sequel until Nintendo's next flagship console launched.
That's according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, who commented on Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope's underwhelming commercial performance in comparison to its predecessor, despite the glowingly positive reception and award nominations the sequel would go on to receive.
"We had already released a Mario + Rabbids game [on Switch], so by doing another we had two similar experiences on one machine," Guillemot said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. "On Nintendo, games like this never die. There are 25 Mario games on Switch.
"Nintendo [has advised] that it's better to do one iteration on each machine," he continued. "We were a bit too early, we should have waited for [the next console]."
There's a few things to pull from Guillemot's analysis here. There are indeed a lot of Mario titles on Nintendo Switch. Many we'd even consider the best Nintendo Switch games you can buy. But with such an abundance, some of those projects are likely to get lost in the sauce; a fate that seems to have befallen Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope.
The "one iteration on each machine" comment checks out. From his mainline 3D platformers to sports and karting titles, you typically see one of each across Nintendo console generations. That's certainly the case for Mario Kart, which has only ever featured one title per console. The same mostly goes for his big 3D outings (unless you count Super Mario Galaxy 2) and the popular Tennis subseries.
Still, despite the underperformance of the Mario + Rabbids sequel, it doesn't seem to have burnt any bridges between Ubisoft and Nintendo. There's every chance we see a third game in the strategy series show up on future Nintendo hardware.
In the meantime, the next Nintendo Direct is happening later today. Read up on our how to watch the Nintendo Direct guide to learn when it's going live in your region to catch all the new announcements as they happen.
