I don't understand how Nintendo has maintained its fun and harmless image while being worse than Disney when it comes to protecting its assets. You look at stuff like joycon drift, suing literally everyone who even thinks about emulation, or streaming, and they are still in the "good" light by most people.
I've found that the answer to this is simple, and may be broadly applied to any bad actor in the gaming industry: They make games people want to play.
This isn't even (remotely) limited to people who don't read the news stories. I have personally spoken with scores of people who will (for example) express displeasure over Ubisoft's culture of sexual abuse, and not blink an eye when it came time to purchase Assassain's Creed: Valhalla. Or of Rockstar's culture of abusive crunch and equally abusive Twitter presence while buying premium versions of TLOU2.
So long as they pump out decent-to-good games, no amount of bad press will impact the number of games (and microtransactions) purchased. And sadly even bad games won't dent their reputation that much, especially if followed up by a good game again.
Bioware, as an example, is being lauded in the press and by gamers in general again because they announced that they're making another Mass Effect game. There's very little hesitation before gushing about it, even given ME: Andromeda and Anthem.
Even the press releases about The Witcher 4 are filled with praise for a company that just released a turd of a game (though you'll still find plenty of people who heap praise upon CP2077 because they have the blessed combination of PC components).
The video game software development industry is fundamentally broken in its corporate culture. I simply do not understand where they're finding people who are willing to work 'crunch' 60 to 75 hour work weeks without overtime to ship a game quicker. There is seemingly a near infinite supply of young, somewhat naive people who can be recruited by video game development studios to do so.
I work in a role where there is a real possibility that I might be woken up at 3am by an on-call alert. Or that I might have to work the occasional work week far past 40 hours due to an emergency. But it's in service of a critical infrastructure project (carrier-of-carrier ISP backbone links), not a video game. There is no video game on the planet that is so important people can't work a normal 40 hour work week.
If a video game developer can't build, QA and ship a game with a team of people working normal office hours, then in my opinion their priorities are grossly out of whack.
I have lost track of the number of instances I have seen of big video game development studios treating their employees in an abusive manner.
And yes, I suppose I'm somewhat of a hypocrite here. I bought a used copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey for $20 on ebay. I bought a copy of Fallout 4 for $18 on the xbox one game store. Am I contributing to the problem? Very likely.
> I simply do not understand where they're finding people who are willing to work 'crunch' 60 to 75 hour work weeks without overtime to ship a game quicker. There is seemingly a near infinite supply of young, somewhat naive people who can be recruited by video game development studios to do so.
It seems obvious the games industry is manufacturing its own supply of naive young programmers who want to make games. People are drawn to work in this industry after years of consuming the product of the same industry. Extant exploited game developers produce the propaganda that will indoctrinate the next generation of exploited developers.
Video games have real magic in them: a powerful motivator to work shitty dead end jobs for too many hours and inadequate pay. Hopefully more aspiring developers will develop independently, I would rather do hardscaping than work in a studio where my labor didn't belong to me.
A good chunk of anime translators come from the fan translation scene, and the problem with that scene is that it's brainwashed people into think they should work for recognition instead of money. This results in some really fucked-up dynamics, such as:
1. Bootleg streaming sites that charge you for fansubs. This has been a particular thorn in the side of the licensed translation business because the old unspoken rule of "don't translate licensed works" has long since been forgotten. They rely entirely on unpaid labor throughout the chain, and are absolutely parasites on everyone. (If there was one compelling argument for "stop-having-fun-guys" levels of copyright maximalism, it would be these sites.)
2. Crunchyroll's absolutely terrible translator wages. This particular site actually used to be one of those old bootleg streaming services, so when they did "go legit", they kept the underlying mentality of paying people peanuts. They're basically parasites dressed up in a fancy suit.
3. People in the legit side of the business (save for Crunchy) having extremely negative aspersions on anyone who had a history of working in the fan translation scene. Occasionally this is for proper CYA reasons, but more often it's a weird form of elitism.
Quite honestly, I think we should start looking at any industry with fan passion surrounding it as a huge exploitation smell. For every person risking millions of dollars in copyright liability by making a cool fan project, there's probably 9 or 10 more people who became trained professionals the "proper" way and wound up getting jobs at these big companies where they were chewed up and spat out. Any business that has the potential to live off the backs of fan labor is probably doing so, even by accident.
I agree 100% something is wrong. What's curious to me is why it's not fixed.
It's possible it's impossible to make anime and pay a good wage I suppose but ... assuming it is possible you'd expect some animators to quit and start their own company and attract all the talent by paying well and not over-working their employees. So what's preventing that from happening?
Same with games.
One idea (which I don't like), the odds of making a game or anime that make it's money back is extremely small. Either you make Minecraft (game) or One Piece (anime) or you more likely make "Tower Miners" or "Comic Party" (I just googled failed games and failed anime).
Just like saying "I'm going to be a music Rock Star/NYT best selling author/Movie star", the odds that you will be the next hit star are extremely low. It's no different for games. And if it's not a hit you lose money which means you don't make a living wage.
Is that the reason those industries pay so low? Because the odds of them making their money back are like 1000 to 1 against and so they have to keep budgets as small as possible just to survive until they hit the 1 out of the 1000?
Is there some other way to get a $$$$$$$ budget to pay 10-15 people a living wage while the odds of making back that money on sales are 1000 to 1?
PS: I know the story in anime is that prices that broadcasters / publishers pay are low because of history but that seems irrelevant in 2020 when you can reach fans via the internet.
EA is notorious for long hours and mediocre pay. But they pretty much know any game they make will be profitable. I think this is true of many large game companies.
> I simply do not understand where they're finding people who are willing to work 'crunch' 60 to 75 hour work weeks without overtime to ship a game quicker. There is seemingly a near infinite supply of young, somewhat naive people who can be recruited by video game development studios to do so.
I think you kind of answered your own question. There are a lot more "young and somewhat naive people" interesting in working for a gaming company than your "critical infrastructure project". Sure, many of them may get jaded and decide it's not worth it so change industries, but there is a new crop every year.
The truth is, a lot of industries are abusive like this, unless you make it into a top echelon (size varies by industry).
Look at the hours for drawing or animation. Or in the film industry, there are unions, but work conditions are similar in non union productions, and unions are often abusive to younger and newer members.
Unlike most posters on HN I cannot speak for the whole industry, since I actually had been working there for a couple decades so I can speak only about my motivation. First of all it's interesting. All I do is solve interesting math problems and get paid for that. Then there is money: I get paid a bonus based on the game's sales. And some vanity too - there are games around whose authors are already dead yet they are remembered because of these games and their creations left a significant impact on millions of people.
> I have personally spoken with scores of people who will (for example) express displeasure over Ubisoft's culture of sexual abuse, and not blink an eye when it came time to purchase Assassain's Creed: Valhalla. Or of Rockstar's culture of abusive crunch and equally abusive Twitter presence while buying premium versions of TLOU2.
You say this as if these people are being inconsistent. I'd argue they are not. Any individual sale of a mass market good has as-close-to-zero-as-possible impact on the publisher's bottom line. But it increases the quality of life of the purchaser who is then better equipped to make a difference through advocacy.
> And sadly even bad games won't dent their reputation that much, especially if followed up by a good game again.
People buy individual games not reputation. Sometimes people buy nostalgia, but often regret it. Giving money to a company based on reputation is a donation. I think it's important to keep in mind that buying and donating are separate things with separate motivations.
> You say this as if these people are being inconsistant.
They absolutely are. If you disapprove of a company’s practices, the first move is to not financially support that company (no matter how small your individual contribution). The second move is advocacy.
Citing mass market purchase numbers when buying from a company someone morally disagrees with is merely a justification to assuage their own guilt at making the purchase. And it’s a pretty a poor one at that.
> People buy individual games, not reputation.
CDPR’s release of CyberPunk 2077, and the hype leading up to that puts lie to that assertion. It was bought more off the reputation of CDPR based of the Witcher series than any merits it had on its own. This was evident in almost every discussion leading up to it. In fact, aside from marketing, CP2077 had no real reputation of its own when it busted preorder records.
> If you disapprove of a company’s practices, the first move is to not financially support that company (no matter how small your individual contribution).
As a general rule, I do find this is often difficult to actually put into practice.
However, you are exactly right when it comes to video games. It's a crowded market of entertainment products. You can find an alternative that you will enjoy just as much with less hypocrisy.
People act the same with movies & hollywood. The story of the abusive director with a short fuse is so common it's a TV trope. #metoo first got traction in the movie industry after all.
In the first class of a film elective I took in college, the professor read a list of movies and their directors we would be watching. When he got to Roman Polanski, he paused and glared around the room, as though daring anybody to voice an objection.
The problem I have is the gushing praise for the director's technical or artistic skill, without any mention of anything else. The movie industry has protected and defended this guy for decades. Film professors who only want to talk about art, not the artists, play a role in perpetuating this ongoing injustice.
>Film professors who only want to talk about art, not the artists, play a role in perpetuating this ongoing injustice.
I agree that there is an injustice in the willful ignorance one must have to abstract the art from the artist during discussion -- but frankly if we were to focus more heavily on the damaged artist during the discussion of art :
A) the topic drifts from aesthetic appreciation to a mix of criminology/sociology/psychology/hearsay/pop-culture trivia information
B) it's an on-going philosophical/ontological debate as to whether or not the actions of the artist should be considered within the scope of the discussion of the art.
To expound on B : It's fairly well understood that if I showed a painting of nearly any skill level to 3 groups of people, and I differ the backstory between the three of them, I can easily manipulate the surveyed aesthetic appreciation from each of the test groups.
If that effect is well demonstrated, and the topic of study and discussion is 'Art', and i'm asked to create an analysis of the aesthetic of a specific piece .. should I consider the artist backstory as a confounding factor with regards to any analysis I might do on the art piece?
Some people consider those confounding factors to be within the scope of artistic discussion -- some people don't.
Personally I find that only classical depictions of artists get a lot of heat about their personal lives : painters, directors, photographers, writers.
Meanwhile certain industrial designers and architects are on record as being wildly racist or misogynist, and no one mentions it or bats an eye... but then again industrial design and architecture are on the fringes of art where many seem not to realize the artistry element exists at all.
> filled with praise for a company that just released a turd of a game
Hey now, that's harsh. If you have a decent-spec gaming PC you have the "blessed combination". The console releases were a trainwreck but unless you're calling Skyrim and Fallout 4 turds as well I wouldn't put CP2077 in that category.
Even if you don't experience performance problems, the game is buggy as all hell, and some of those bugs are game breaking.
Besides, the issue at hand here is company reputation. CDPR knowingly released a game to consoles that is damn near unplayable. It was a blatant cash grab at the expense of their customers, and if you honestly believe they didn't know what the state of the game was prior to release then I have a bridge to sell you.
Sony actually has pretty strict certification criteria from what Ive read, so the assumption is that CDPR promised a day 1 fix for all of this stuff and they failed. Miserably.
Cool for you, I'm glad. We have thousands of streams showing people with high end rigs running into ridiculous bugs, and it's completely irrelevant in regards to the console versions.
There has not been thousands of stream that is complete hyperbole at least for PC, but yes granted console has been a complete shitshow and is inexcusable.
Try not to... uhhh... collect too many items... while playing your RPG... I guess. Top notch QA, really (though I think we both know deep down it's not really a QA problem.)
You call me an asshole and somehow I'm the jerk? I'm saying your point is both wrong and irrelevant, which it is. Maybe you're the one with the problem.
In one sentence, I will give my justification for calling it a turd:
8MB save file size limitation.
Every other bug aside, that you can crash your game by collecting too many items in the game, and your recourse is to “collect less items” is utterly inexcusable.
That doesn’t even mention getting kicked off an entire platform after being launched. A feat only achieved by one other game in history.
Ehh collecting items will never do it craft is what does it every item crafted will add a section to the save file detailing the items stats that doesn't go away when you sell or get rid of the item.
I agree, that bug is probably the most ridiculous. To be honest I'm trying to fathom how it even exists, it seems so easy to just up whatever limit is imposing that size.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's literally a variable called SAVEGAME that's a char[8192] array somewhere in the serialization path and that's what's causing the corruption.
You can't even get refunds in their online store, period.
Once bought a game by accident, realized it wouldn't work (local-only party game, thought it was online), immediately requested a refund, and they flatly refused the refund because it was already downloaded and they claim the contract has been fulfilled.
Even if they're legally in the right (remains to be seen, they're currently being sued over this exact thing by a German watchdog), it felt very hostile and I'm not ever buying from them again.
Nintendo seems to do customer support fine with hardware, but their treatment of digital products and data is extremely hostile.
The Switch has a backup feature, but the backups are hardware ID locked, so if you lose your Switch and get a replacement, lol, the backups are useless. This is made worse because even though you may have a physical cartridge game, the actual save files are on the machine.
Personally I had a run in with this when I upgraded to a 3DS XL, and I didn't check for dead pixels until after I transferred all my data. They locked the transfer feature for a week+ so I couldn't go and get my device replaced for a week, and my data was held hostage on a machine with stuck/dead pixels dead center on what is already a low resolution display.
The Switch has a backup feature if you pay for their Nintendo Switch Online service, which is more competitive with PS2 online services than with anything from Microsoft or Sony in the last decade.
Sadly, this isn't totally true -- Sony only does cloud backups via PS+, a paid subscription. Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn't require their paid service to use cloud saves, but they're more tightly integrated into the system (likely because they're available to all users).
It sucks because the X360/PS3/Wii generation of consoles supported saving & loading games off of external commodity storage (the X360 supported any USB drive, the Wii SD cards, and the PS3 both, if you had one of the earlier units with a SD card slot), but that was disabled as it became clear that save games could be used to jailbreak the systems and install bootloaders/firmware that disabled DRM.
PS4 still lets you backup saves to a USB stick, last I checked? It's a shame that the Xbox One doesn't, and we're on to the new generation now in any case.
If you don't pay Nintendo a monthly fee, the Switch has no backups. Console gets stolen (more likely than its competitors, since it's a portable system) or you have a hardware failure? Everything's gone.
I have a Switch, but the only games I'll buy for it are ones where I wouldn't particularly care if it destroyed all my save files. Had that experience after a Wii hardware failure and I never went back and finished any of the games I was partway through because I didn't want to replay the first 3/4 of them just to get to the last bit.
Should have mentioned here, the reason Nintendo doesn't have this is probably that you could use it to cheat at Pokemon trading by restoring a backup to get back copies of things you'd given away.
Because that's more important than making sure their customers don't lose literally all the game progress in all of the games that they've played.
I can't imagine pouring hours and hours into your Animal Crossing island on a console that has an SD card slot and doesn't let you make a backup. Someone's going to learn a hard lesson from that about where Nintendo's priorities are.
I still really don't get why not have cloud backups on Animal Crossing. Like, they are afraid people are going to cheat. But... it's not a multiplayer game. The only thing you do is visit other peoples' islands.
I think you're confusing Switch and 3DS. They changed the Switch so that most games can be cloud-saved, and it'll automatically copy your saves if you have two systems with the same games on them. Game licenses also carry with you if you're online with multiple systems, and the offline half of the license can be remotely revoked and transferred.
Animal Crossing and Pokemon are outliers. The former has a backup system that only can be used if you call Nintendo customer support. If you plan your transfer ahead of time you can do it yourself, 3DS-style, but it took them multiple updates to implement that. (Part of this is because the island is owned by the system, not individual users, which is an odd design choice.) I have no idea how Game Freak expects you to keep your Pokemon saves safe.
If you can't even get refunds when a game doesn't work as advertized or is not fit for purpose (Cyberpunk isn't on the Switch for obvious reasons, but it would be an example of a game not being fit for purpose) this would absolutely be illegal in Australia and the government will come after them.
Nintendo won a case in the EU that the preorder "pre-load" (an unplayable blob representing a game that requires a special cryptographic key that Nintendo sends on release date) constitutes a delivery and as such no one can request refunds. Even if the game is not possibly playable without figuring out how to break AES-256-CTR
That shit wouldn't fly in Australia. no one wants the ACCC going after them. They are worst than Nintendo when it comes to law suits, which is amazing for customers. its the only reason steam actually offers refunds now days.
Would this be because of the general anti-returns/exchanges culture in Japan?
I mean it sounds super sh!tty when you're accustomed to the extremely lenient returns / refunds policies of the west, while Japan (in specific) is on the polar opposite of that.
One thing that really rubs me the wrong way: aggressively stomping out ROM distribution (for entire distributors, not just for their own properties) while packaging the same technology in their e-shops or in boutique toys like the SNES Classic, new Game & Watch, etc. This portends a future where we get to play the same few dozen sanctioned "classics" on a continually updating hardware/software treadmill, while countless more games are lost to time and aging hardware. What happens to masterpieces like Terranigma?
I know it's a difficult position to argue for practically, but I think piracy is vital to ensure the longevity of all forms of commercial art like video games, TV shows, and music. Luckily I think pirates will always find a way to keep content alive, but if every company were as aggressive as Nintendo then I would start to worry.
> I know it's a difficult position to argue for practically, but I think piracy is vital to ensure the longevity of all forms of commercial art like video games, TV shows, and music.
Not at all a difficult position to argue for. This practice is called a library, and it's a very popular concept.
We've got three options to preserve human culture:
- extremely harsh copyright limits (single digit number of years, so it's still in the public conscious and can actually be found again after copyright expires)
- copyright only applying for the duration that said content is widely available (no suing someone for publishing content you don't even sell)
- refusing to abide by copyright laws (community sourced archives)
I'd be happy to go with either of the first two options, but media conglomerates aren't, so piracy it is.
> I know it's a difficult position to argue for practically
I'm not sure it is. It's a completely novel state of affairs that companies expect to have perpetual ownership and absolute control/monopoly over what they've created. It's completely unjustified outside of "well, we have the money to make it so" and the public domain is dead solely because of efforts of companies like Disney.
While some people would blame it on Nintendo producing products people want, I think its a little more cultural than that: Nintendo, as a company, deeply fails to understand Western culture. Because of this decades-long misunderstanding, they've developed a weird culture of isolation with the west; far more-so than other Japanese game developers like PlayStation, who have a REALLY strong western corporate presence.
Though, I'd argue Nintendo's interactions with the west are really similar to another Japanese developer, From Software. They both have a massive, rabid western fanbase who orgasm at every bit of news these eastern companies hand out. Well, in the end, they give out very little, and a lot of their game releases follow a pattern of "we're making new game, here's a teaser trailer" (three years pass with literally nothing) "ok, game is out today, have fun". Contrast that to Cyberpunk and other western developers, which more follow a pattern of constant community engagement, developer diaries, release dates promised a year in advance, then missed, playable demos, marketing deal with Doritos, sponsored twitch streams, etc.
Its a rather interesting case study in how game companies should communicate with their base. You'd initially think that more communication is always better, but there's so much evidence to the contrary (Nintendo, From, Valve, and Team Cherry immediately come to mind). By rarely communicating these companies exempt themselves from a lot of criticism; obviously this exemption applies to the games they're developing, but it really does extend to everything they do.
If you watch the Engoodening of No Man's Sky on YouTube, it argues exactly this. Every thing that Hello Games' Sean Murray said ended up haunting him, and them stopping the communication and just getting to work is how NMS got to being one of the better space sims today.
> suing literally everyone who even thinks about emulation
This misleading claim is patently untrue. Dolphin has thrived for years.
Nintendo goes after hackers/crackers and ROM hosts. They legally don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to clean-room emulation, so they don't bother.
They also, to my mind, haven't gone after people who just download ROMs, which puts them on higher moral ground than the RIAA and MPAA of which Disney is apart.
Add to the list everything going in the Smash community right now, which has spilled over into other communities that support the Smash community. Nintendo is more or less cancelling events because people still like Smash Bros Melee.
To be fair, they're cancelling events because they're using emulation to play Melee. They've previously allowed it at events. Not saying that's necessarily the right choice, but it's important to get the facts straight.
Also, there's been lots of serious issues with the Melee community leaders recently with sexual misconduct, so it's also possible that Nintendo just wants to distance themselves from the whole scene.
They previously "allowed" it at Evo 2013 after massive backlash from trying to shut down the Melee stream, years before anything related to sexual misconduct was talked about. There is nothing recent enough about how they treat the Melee scene to blame emulators or sexual misconduct, it's been documented to be happening since the scene was revived post-brawl.
The evo shutdown was presumably attempted to avoid any comparisons between their newest game (Brawl) and Melee; similarly, the recent shutdown probably has more to do with how bad Ultimate's online is compared to emulated Melee, rather than the mere fact that they're on an emulator in the first place. Other emulated online Melee tournaments without Ultimate have gotten away with it so far.
Honestly if I could play smash bros on my macbook with my friends and relatives I'd sell my switch today.
The switch screen is too small for local multiplayer and hooking it up to a TV w/ power is too bulky and annoying because they're picky about adapters unlike laptops. You also need a case to transport them because they turn on too easily when their buttons are exposed. A 13" laptop is way better.
(I'm not doing local multiplayer today because COVID, but I know I will in during future trips)
Indeed it feels very clunky at first due to the complete absence of an input buffer; you must only input commands once they become possible. The learning curve is brutal.
Other than that the game is far more responsive than Ultimate, with only 3 total frames of input latency even online, unlike the 6 frames offline and at least ten online of Ultimate.
It would be nice for Ultimate to have better latency…
I'm not sure when you tried. The current state-of-the-art emulation for melee is much more responsive than console melee; on a high-refresh-rate gaming monitor, you have 2 whole frames of extra input lag to play around with. For local play you can just set the appropriate buffer to match console melee; if you're playing online, those frames are used to send inputs to your opponent(s), making online possible without any extra delay.
Mmmm, if they're trying to play on a Mac, Slippi is currently a bit rougher than the other platforms. A common misconception is that Slippi = Dolphin; in reality, Slippi is (currently) a fork of an older Dolphin and doesn't have the features for macOS that modern Dolphin has (e.g, a Metal/MoltenVK graphics backend). OpenGL on macOS is a nightmare - and indeed, if you opened mainline Dolphin right now and tried to play it using OpenGL, it will tell you in bright yellow letters that it's going to be bad. :)
I backported an earlier version of the Metal/MoltenVK backend to Slippi which should hopefully be in the next release, whenever they get around to it. This provides decent performance on Intel Macs and ARM Macs under Rosetta 2, and ideally tides the (mac) community over until Slippi finds parity with mainline Dolphin.
Did Nintendo also lobby hard to get copyright laws extended and push for harmful DRM? Disney just doesn't protect it's assets, it steals from the public and pushes for bad laws. I'm not aware of Nintendo doing similar things which is why they rank higher in my book.
Sadly there are a bunch of people that have a cult of a certain company and nothing will make them realize that their cult company is, in fact, a regular company trying to squeeze as much profit as possible.
All this stalking looks illegal though, that is really beyond acceptable.
The guy being stalked is a 26 years old person. Looking back at when I was 26, if I suddenly had known I had a multinational company sending out PIs to stalk me, I'd be freaking the f out.
You don't necessarily need a cult following though. I despise Nintendo's approach to the mod community, and their pitiful online implementations, but I still think they make great games. I'm not really a fanboy either, I just enjoy some of their games. I could take a stronger moral stand and and boycott them, but let's be realistic it'll be just a drop in the bucket, just like boycotting Disney.
This, to me, is the right attitude to have. I really hope the pendulum eventually swings back to it being acceptable to have nuanced opinions about things. Nowadays if you dislike one thing a corporation does, or one publicized event from some public figure, you're expected to burn every bridge related to it or be branded as a hypocrite at best, or it's assumed you're an evangelizing psycho cultist for whatever that thing is.
I’d argue nostalgia. Nintendo helped save the video game industry after the crash in the 80s while also portraying itself as a “fun” company. Even then, their legal department was still aggressive, but it just wasn’t as publicized. Today, it’s more known, but nostalgia carries a lot of weight in public opinion.
In my experience, most people who buy Nintendo products today aren't hardcore gamers, and most of these issues don't matter to them. This is going to come off as condescending and rude to Nintendo gamers, but I find most modern Nintendo games to be glorified demos than serious games. There's nothing wrong with that, but they're a crowd with different priorities.
Although Nintendo hasn't been as bad about this in recent years, I vowed to never give them money again after they wiped out countless numbers of YouTube channels with walkthroughs for games they don't even publish anymore. It's like, WTF, you have these people promoting your games for free, games you don't even sell anymore, and you're punishing them for showing other people how great your games are. It comes off as so "old man get off my lawn" that I can't ever reward it or respect it. As far as I can tell, Microsoft doesn't DMCA remove videos featuring Halo: Combat Evolved, a game that's nearly 20 years old, but Nintendo ruthlessly removed tons of videos that showed games like Goldeneye 007 under fair use, which are now gone forever. That's an abuse of the public space. Screw Nintendo. (Ironically, Microsoft owns Rare now, but I'm pretty sure Nintendo has both rights to James Bond and the N64 game)
I wouldn't necessarily say that they're not capable of serious games. I would say that they're not capable of high-spec games, and that those are distinct things. Even in a phone, the limiting factor on your ability to play something fast-paced -- like Tetris or Street Fighter or a Metroidvania -- is less about the GPU, and more about the controls and the networking. With better display casting coming (multiple vendors employing 6GHz WiFi are targeting this as a use case, including for VR), and every console's controllers using Bluetooth and getting supported by general-purpose OSes, this is going to get better over time - Particularly after the Mac/Windows ecosystems have further shifted toward ARM and studios begin to target the platform in a way that isn't specifically about capturing the mobile market.
Because don't get me wrong, the internals are a factor -- the ARM/x86 gap was significantly wider in the Tegra X1's day, it was already multiple years old when the Switch shipped, and being the only console on ARM can't have helped with attracting third parties. But as a Switch owner who has played a lot of Smash on the thing, what's really holding it back as a dedicated console is that it has a lot of nagging quality of life issues -- things like the inability to get a good first-party D-Pad, and their persistently baffling refusal to ship Ethernet despite it being standard on every competing platform since the original XBox. Their solution for the latter when they announced the details for Smash Ultimate was to say "lol hope you've got an adapter!" Which also makes the netplay worse at scale by ensuring that even more players are going to just resort to WiFi instead. (Not that the game's netcode can't also be outperformed by an emulator that people are using to play its 20-year-old predecessor.) These issues are one thing for a phone, but there's a completely separate bar for a device that's literally built for this.
The problem with the Switch isn't just the audience it's made for, or that because of that target it isn't keeping up with games like Cyberpunk. It's that even when you get to some of the areas where it should shine -- titles like Tetris 99, or Hollow Knight -- it's also tangibly worse at playing them than its competitors, for reasons that have nothing to do with its frame rate.
> Although Nintendo hasn't been as bad about this in recent years, I vowed to never give them money again after they wiped out countless numbers of YouTube channels with walkthroughs for games they don't even publish anymore.
They're not much better now. Check out what happened to The Big House for trying to use said emulator's netplay to run a Melee tournament during a plague, and all the ensuing fallout. I'm genuinely starting to consider migrating back off Nintendo consoles over it myself.
Nintendo creates games I love. All the bad stuff is so insignificant in comparison. It’s like hating your own mother because she refuses to bake your favorite cake the way you like it. Nonsense.
Not the OP, but I think the point is that it's just not a large enough issue for me to care about given how much I like what they produce. Honestly, I just really don't care. I don't like it, but there are a lot of things in life I don't like. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this view.
I do care (and steadfastly refuse to play newer pokemon/animal crossing due to the save shenanigans), but not so much that I didn't buy a (used) switch with the top games (Mario odyssey, Mario kart, breath of the wild, smash) on cartridges.
I am super sad that there's no easy way to run Android (for steam link) on it, but I understand (if not agree with) Nintendo's position here. If I could play all my steam games on my switch, I'd never buy switch games except exclusives (which is most of my library anyway).
They have so many die hard fans and lovers of their IP that they get away with a lot. There hasnt been a pokemon game that was actually exciting to most fans in over 15 years but people that grew up playing red and blue and watching the TV show will still buy every game.
To be fair, what would people expect from Pokemon besides redefining the core mechanics? The physical/special split was 13 years ago, arguably the biggest and best change in Pokemon. There are only so many ways one can improve a turn-based RPG without it becoming too complex for kids to enjoy (graphical improvements not withstanding).
It feels like they designed themselves into a corner here.
The problem with Pokémon isn't a dearth of new ideas (the fairy type is a great addition, as well as EXP share and several newer improvements).
The problem is there are more and better animations in Pokémon coliseum (an N64 game) than the latest release. When every move amounts to
- Move Pokémon towards opponent
- A few sparkles
there's just no reason to care about any individual Pokémon (or even type) anymore.
It is changing among most critical fans, but most consumers do not look past their local game store. Plus, their games are still really enjoyable to many, despite these malpractices (even those affecting the games themselves, like Origami King).
That said, it is pretty hard to think of toon-shaded "bing bing wahoo" man as the mascot of shady practices.
Nintendo is a pretty interesting company, the stories I have heard are completely the opposite of the colorful friendly reality they paint on the outside. Maybe it's because of how ruthless they are that they are able to do it--I wouldn't know, no one told me.
Don't forget that they are one of few companies defending hardware region locks, cannot do a simple online services for their products and are basically selling overpriced crap in low quantities to boost sales with artificial scarcity.(nes mini craze etc.).
It is one of most anti-consumer corporations in the console market and they are loved. I seriously do not get it.
I do play the games, i own some of their consoles.
It doesn't excuse the state their online services are, and to be honest - most of their 1st party games are severely overrated if you take away the nostalgia for the series.
> I don't understand how Nintendo has maintained its fun and harmless image while being worse than Disney when it comes to protecting its assets.
People are capable of recognizing a difference between the portion of the company creating quality entertainment and the portion doing a very aggressive job defending their IP.
Never underestimate the ability of enthusiasts to defend giant corporations. For example, all discussion of this leak has been banned and scrubbed from the two biggest gaming forums on the internet (/r/games and ResetEra).
Cause they make games that are fun and suitable for children. Games that are fun for both adults and kids. Games that don't offend anyone without being dumb.
Lot to unpack in your comment.
1). This group of modders was planning on profiting from their hack.
2). Copyright exists and generally must be enforced lest the holder wishes to lose their rights.
3). "worse than disney" -> that's subjective.
4). Emulator writers don't get sued, providing the required binary file is the illegal part.
Most of your comments are opinion and borderline bad faith representations of their situation.
A bit OT, but my favorite use-it-or-lose-it trademark example: the Standard Oil gas station on Van Ness in SF (it looks almost exactly like a Chevron station).
> Copyright exists and generally must be enforced lest the holder wishes to lose their rights.
That's not how copyright works. It's how trademarks work, but you don't lose copyright if you don't actively enforce it.
> Emulator writers don't get sued
Remember, Jack Valenti went to his grave still believing that the VCR was to Hollywood what the Boston Strangler was to the woman home alone.
To Nintendo, emulation is a crime. (Except when they do it, because they own or license the rights to the platforms in question.) As soon as their legal team thinks they can get a ruling that will overturn Sony v. Connectix, they will be on that like white on rice. Failing that, harassment, intimidation, and threats will do.
