I strongly disagree with you on the marketing/hype point, we know SNKP is not going to be involved on this but we've seen Ignition do a ton of advertising, marketing and propaganda for KOF XII and they game was still a flop (we both agree on the flop). At the end of the day it all comes down to they game being good and balanced, now that will make your latter point true and will encourage players to pick up the game and push it and promote it.
If for you sales is the only factor in what makes a game a flop or not and I can tell you that Aracana Heart 3 is no where 2 million+ sales but it will be a part of EVO 2011 someway (I can't say how). Which IMO is more valuable than selling 1 million copies and having no type of exposure at major events.
Ignition did an okay job on marketing and it did increase sales since the game actually sold more copies than any previous KOF since the mid 90s. The game flopped because it was a bad game, not because one character had an overpowered, but not game breaking move. You said to be successful the game needs to be good and balanced. XII is one of the most balanced KOF but is just not a good game, with bad netcode. XIII
IS already a good game with being one of the most balanced KOFs to date even in it's current state. If it wasn't I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be playing it now (just like how we stopped playing XII 5-6 months after release). Also I don't think you would have bought the board and game if it was bad / too unbalanced.
Marketing would've worked better to get the XII mainstream if the game system was as good as XIII.
I honestly don't see AH3 as a success yet. Most large tournaments are either not hosting the game, barely have enough or not enough participants. They are in the official Evo line up, but yet to be determined if it will have many participants. I'm pretty sure they're able to get in the Evo due to relations with Aksys and dealing with a somewhat drama-less community (unlikes KOF forums in SRK). I think we've already pretty much solved this part since the KOF thread at SRK pretty much died, and Dream Cancel has started up, still going strong and being recognized.
Back to what I was saying before, all we're talking about is Raiden's dropkick and it's not going change whether the game will be successful or not. I never even said that they shouldn't balance it, I would like to see it actually. But you can be sure that if they're going to balance that, there's a high chance that other characters will get hit by the nerf stick like the characters you main - K', Kula, Elizabeth.
I would say the thing about what MK9 has is due mainly to marketing. That tournament with the $21K pot is actually run by PDP, but sponsored by Nether Realms. The tournament was announced before the game was even released for marketing (getting high level players to try to play the game seriously). I'm sure if a month before console release, SNKP ran a $21k pot tournament that there would be larger amount of attention. I'm pretty sure Aksys realized this as well since they're throwing in $5k and $1k for Blazblue and AH3 at Revelations.
