In defense of Boo Destroyer, Pikmin 4 has never been listed in Nintendo's financial documents as an upcoming project. This isn't like Prime 4 or Tokyo Mirage Sessions where they announce it and we hear nothing for years. As far as the investors are concerned, there are no OFFICIAL plans to release Pikmin 4 as a consumer product. Of course that would change as soon as Nintendo features it in a Direct.
It's true: the circumstance is unlike
Prime 4 or
Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE which were outright announced through very official channels, but that's kind of the point;
if the situation were like those, this would likely be a very different thread, assuming it were to exist in the first place.
This doesn't, however, alter much regarding the pikmin-flinging shenanigans from earlier. While the lack of a placement on these documents was mentioned, the crux of the post in question was that everything here is all Miyamoto running his mouth, nothing from Nintendo otherwise. And
that's just not the case, unless one assumes Eurogamer was entirely fabricating Nintendo's confirmation of the project's existence.
And that's a stance which seems weirdly indicated, as another major element was the supposition that this reporting can't be trusted, using what was a supposed leak as the prime example (the intrinsic difference between leaks and statements made to one's face probably doesn't need to be explained). Other posts earlier tie further into this point.
The lack of
Pikmin in official business documents is noted, but wasn't really what anybody took issue with.
The Destroyer of Boos did have something of a point earlier, though, that
Pikmin doesn't exactly have these big teams dedicated it and it alone; what that doesn't mean, however, is that there isn't work being conducted.
Some manner of group, regardless of size, is tinkering with it -- "always working on the next one" --, figuring out directions so the project can enter full development with that full team.
There's no need to assume a new Pikmin has been in active full development this whole time. That doesn't mean we need to assume it's not being worked on, nor that it's never picked up in progress.
Unless we assume Eurogamer was straight up lying, Nintendo confirmed that the project was in development. This doesn't tell us much, except that
it exists -- or at least did.
Probability indicates it still does in some form, but that doesn't mean it'll necessarily show up any time soon.
It seems likely a new game could follow the same sort of trajectory as
Pikmin 3, bouncing from one system to another over a period of years. What plans are concocted at one time might not be ideal when the circumstances change.
Maybe the initial statement was misunderstood -- it could be that the overall project wasn't as close to completion as people have believed, a possibility attested to quite clearly in the opening post. Maybe the game actually was rather far along, but Nintendo determined the Wii U was not a good home for it, or it was going to take enough time to switch systems anyway, in which case different design elements might have to be reworked.
I do suspect that, regardless the state production was in at the time, switching systems likely necessitated rethinking different elements. Maybe the wild success of the new
Zelda drove them to try to rethink it
even further, though that goes further into conjecture.
And this fits with reports that the project has seen reboots, like
its father Pikmin 3 before it.
We will likely never know all the inner workings that have taken place here, but it remains:
Pikmin was being worked on and is likely still. We don't know what state it's in, nor when it might finally be seen.
It'll be ready when it's ready.
