marvel problem

In marketing terms it is often refered to as the "Marvel problem". Back in the 80s Marvel had a ton of comic releases, but also supported legacy comics as well as a ton of new releases to supplement it. While you'd think this would lead to success, comic-book stores only had a limited amount of shelfspace to give to Marvel and consumers only had a limited budget in terms of money and time to spend on it, leading to many releases simply not being available for sale or only behind the counter, or suffer from low sales in general. This led to terrible sales and eventually to Marvel almost going bankrupt.

This problem expands to digital sales and general products of the modern era. Swarm your consumers in products, and the ones that are actually invested risk being lost in a sea of other low-effort/low-maintenance products (a digital version of the 'shelfspace'). Add to that the limited amount of time and money that consumers have, and it's always a tactical decision of "what do I give my consumers access to".

You can see that they play around with this by using legacy-titles more as a method of getting users to use another product/service. A new Devil May Cry is coming out? Time to re-release the older titles to build excitement. New online-service we want players to start using? Give them Earthbound. This way you not only tightly controle the shelfspace, but also give the older/side products a usage for future endeavours.

The downside is, that this is a very pro-business move and a very anti-consumer move in a sense, especially in the long run with a medium that isn't as readily available in the future. Marvel Comics for example solved the problem in a sense, using digital marketplaces as a side venture, while legacy comics are also often re-released in paperbacks (usually to hype up an upcoming new event). But with video games, the complex copyrights, missing files, compatability issues etc...it's hard. Even a legacy machine like the Mini-SNES for example will eventually not work on newer tv-devices in let's say 20 years. You can always still read a comic as long as you have eyes.