I don't like that Nintendo does this. I don't care who does it, it's wrong.
That said, of all the people doing this, it seems to me Nintendo is among the worst targets to go after. They were, to my eye, dragged into this almost against their will, and if anything they've been backing off from it. It certainly hasn't wormed its way in to their mainline games the way it is well into worming its way in to almost every other major publisher out there's games.
Again, I don't say this to defend them. It's wrong for everyone. What I am saying though is that this is not a very target rich environment, and there are target-rich environments elsewhere. There are companies that seem to be entirely based not only on exploitative mechanics, but exploitative mechanics specifically targeted at children, like Roblox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY, the People Make Games investigations into them, for instance.
Although there is an interesting strategy for Nintendo to pursue here where they get sued, and then basically deliberately construct a precedent-setting loss to knee-cap their competition on this front. There's a lot of competition for Nintendo out there surviving on the basis of these cheap drug hits of monetary injection whose ability to develop good games on their own merits are clearly well into the process of atrophy, and Nintendo would probably stand to benefit even if they have to pay some millions of dollars in settlement payouts to impose those restrictions on them. If those mechanics were, for the sake of argument, banned, I think Nintendo would be a big winner in that scenario. Consumers too, for that matter.
Nintendo was not forced to do anything, they chose to do it because it would make a lot of money. The pressure of shareholders is not an excuse to do something potentially illegal.
So why does Nintendo carry extra scrutiny? Well... For one thing, Nintendo has a market cap of around $50 billion USD, which is absurd. The Roblox corporation is already a behemoth at nearly half that. Do they receive scrutiny? Well, yeah. Maybe not as much as deserved, possibly because despite it's prominence a lot of people just don't know what the hell Roblox even is, versus Nintendo which is the closest thing there is to a video game equivalent of Disney. Nonetheless, Roblox is still in the media and in lawsuits all the time.
It's also definitely a strategic choice for people to rally behind a fight with higher stakes, and slapping Nintendo with a lawsuit could have the potential to send a much stronger message than a lawsuit against other prominent game developers like Ubisoft or EA would have.
It's definitely not "fair", per se, if we're trying to rank companies based on how much they've done badly by their customers and the public. However, Nintendo, as beloved as they may be, are absolutely no stranger to engaging in shitty, anti-consumer behavior, so I have a hard time feeling especially much sympathy for them here.
What do you mean "dragged into this against their will"? Who was forcing Nintendo to add lootboxes to their mobile game, or adopt shitty dark patterns to coerce children into buying them?
Their attempts to break into the mobile industry without using these patterns and basically getting their ass handed to them.
The industry, deliberately or otherwise (I honestly don't know), polluted the mobile gaming space and its expectations in a way that made it virtually impossible to sell a conventional $20 game.
It's generally not worthwhile to try to get meaningful answers from someone who drank the Nintendo flavor-aid. Nintendo is a company that willingly chose to produce and monetize their software in this way. Nobody made them do anything. They wanted this, chose this, and brought this sort of thing to market.
They also took your ability to buy their games away (ownership such as it was) and forced you to buy a subscription to their Switch Online program just to own games you've probably already purchased at least once. Anyone that defends their approach is delusional at best.
As I said in another comment, the industry deliberately or otherwise basically polluted the mobile gaming space and made it effectively impossible to sell a conventional $20-60 one-and-done game. There's a few, but you can nearly list them on your fingers and I'm sure you can list the successful ones on one hand easily.
I'd actually love to peer into the alternate universe where the Apple app store tried harder to establish that applications aren't universally disposable cups-of-coffee price level apps. Would the mobile game space still be the cesspool it is in our universe? There are certainly some forces pulling it towards cheap diversions and the resulting methods of extracting money, but might they have a robust non-cesspool gaming community?
When phones first came out everyone was sure having a console in your pocket was going to destroy the rest of the gaming industry. While I've always thought the opinion underestimated the pains of having a touchscreen-only interface, I also blame the monetization techniques. I don't even look to cell phones for games anymore because I don't have the energy to pour over the details of how they want to hook up gambling mechanics to my credit card to see if I'm interested. I hope the mobile gaming industry enjoys being beholden to their whales because I bailed out years and years ago.
Nintendo dipped in, and probably they shouldn't have, but to my eye they haven't particularly enjoyed it either and are getting out it. It would be better if they had never done it at all, but considering everyone else in the industry has simply jumped into the pool with gusto, they at least seem to be course correcting.
And if that constitutes "drinking the Nintendo flavor-aid" to you, well, screw you too.
Unless the kid also plays Roblox and has been a victim of their behavior he can't exactly sue the company behind it though, can he? Whereas if he actually has played the mobile version of Mario Kart he can.
The difficulty with Roblox is that they merely act as a platform. Plenty of their games have some variety of lootbox, but they are created and published on the Roblox platform by 3rd parties with more shallow pockets. Roblox benefits from that game mechanic, but isn't its originator. I'm not saying the exculpates them at all, but it makes the court battle a lot more difficult.
The kid is not important. He is a convenient foil for the lawyers. This is not a bad thing necessarily; of such things are class action lawsuits made. But they can just as easily find someone hurt by Roblox. It wouldn't hardly take them a day.
Fair point. I'm not familiar with US litigation practices so the idea of lawyers looking for victims to represent in these kinds of cases was not something I considered.
Indeed if you Google for articles from around a decade ago, Nintendo after it's failed Wii U was especially feeling the heat from the ascendent mobile games industry. Dedicated handhelds game consoles were a dying industry. It was in such an environment that it looked to expand into mobile games, which it stopped further expanding after the success of Switch especially during covid.
That said, of all the people doing this, it seems to me Nintendo is among the worst targets to go after. They were, to my eye, dragged into this almost against their will, and if anything they've been backing off from it. It certainly hasn't wormed its way in to their mainline games the way it is well into worming its way in to almost every other major publisher out there's games.
Again, I don't say this to defend them. It's wrong for everyone. What I am saying though is that this is not a very target rich environment, and there are target-rich environments elsewhere. There are companies that seem to be entirely based not only on exploitative mechanics, but exploitative mechanics specifically targeted at children, like Roblox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY, the People Make Games investigations into them, for instance.
Although there is an interesting strategy for Nintendo to pursue here where they get sued, and then basically deliberately construct a precedent-setting loss to knee-cap their competition on this front. There's a lot of competition for Nintendo out there surviving on the basis of these cheap drug hits of monetary injection whose ability to develop good games on their own merits are clearly well into the process of atrophy, and Nintendo would probably stand to benefit even if they have to pay some millions of dollars in settlement payouts to impose those restrictions on them. If those mechanics were, for the sake of argument, banned, I think Nintendo would be a big winner in that scenario. Consumers too, for that matter.