I'm the mayor who puts their house directly next to a nuclear power plant.
Because people originally guessed that SimCity for NES not getting released was due to being too expensive, I was expecting something with a bunch of extra RAM, but instead it's only got 16KB and the game makes a lot of compromises.
With this in mind, it makes sense to me. Why release an inferior version when the SNES version (which was a launch title) can be a system seller and a "proper" SimCity experience?
@NovaSquirrel Games can be cancelled for a whole lot of reasons. The quality of the game is usually a relatively small factor in this decision. Production, distribution, and marketing costs can easily outweigh development by orders of magnitude. (Even being a "cheaper" mapper probably wouldn't have helped much.)
Having been there more than once, I basically will never ask "why" a game gets cancelled. I think of it as the default.
@rainwarrior I get the impression most games just don't end up coming out and usually aren't heard about.
While all you really can do is guess, I do still feel like the SNES version had at least some role in it, even if it was just something as simple as being a higher priority than the NES version.
@NovaSquirrel To them the development cost was probably acceptable R&D. Not the biggest loss to throw away, for them, but maybe worth taking the chance to see what it looked like, in case it was turned out to be really compelling.
Yes, most cancelled stuff gets buried as quietly as it can. It's not good PR to let it be known that you failed to make a game.
@NovaSquirrel (And yes at LEAST half of all games get cancelled. Probably more. Most of them don't make it to quite so finished a state as this one did.)
@NovaSquirrel Yes, the SNES version was competing for the same financial resources internally, and had a lot better prospects.
...but I'd argue that every other Nintendo release that year had the same effect on it, not just its twin. They'd rather spend money convincing people to buy Link to the Past than NES Simcity.
Nintendo more or less just stopped releasing NES games in North America after 1990. (I don't think the games themselves can be blamed for this.)