According to Nintendo Europe’s Senior Marketing Director, Laurent Fischer, the reason Super Smash Bros. Brawl is delayed is due to the shear amount of games Nintendo are currently working on for Europe.

When asked “Was localisation the reason why Smash Bros. has been delayed?” by Official Nintendo Magazine, Laurent responded:

“Well, yeah, that’s always been the big question: why do we have a delay for Smash Bros? You need to see it title by title. It’s the same team, the same pool of teams, that have been localising and that have been proofing. But localisation is only one thing: production is another thing also, because at the moment we are not just producing Smash Bros for Europe, we’re producing hundreds of first party games and third party games for locations all over the world.”

“So localisation issues are one part of the delay, but you also have production issues, logistic issues… so a release date is always the result of a large number of factors, and it’s a complex decision process. It’s not that we deliberately like to be late in Europe, and it’s our job to take care of it, but to localise in six languages is always a challenge.”

There we have it, and it’s not nothing that we haven’t heard before. Part of me is starting to wonder why Nintendo don’t spend some of their megabucks on expanding the European localisation team, but the obvious reason for them would be that it works currently so why spend money on it.

Ah well.. I’ve lived in Europe all my life, so I’m more than used to being behind when it comes to video games.