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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 stuf

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.

colejohnson66 6y ago
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.
sli 6y ago
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.
- vlunkr 6y ago
  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.
  - CarVac 6y ago
    They canceled the stream for a Splatoon 2 tournament because the players had names supportive of Melee. And the sexual misconduct was mainly in the Ultimate scene. Very few prominent Melee players were involved.
  - mactrey 6y ago
    OP is referring to Nintendo cancelling a Splatoon tournament because competitors were using the #FreeMelee hashtag https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/12/nintendo_cancels_splatoon_2_na_open_livestream_free_melee_believed_to_have_played_a_part https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/12/nintendo_cancels_s...
    - vlunkr 6y ago
      Even the article states that's just speculation. > There were no further details, but some fans seem to think they might know what's going on...
  - NoodleIncident 6y ago
    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.
- novok 6y ago
  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)
  - CarVac 6y ago
    You can: https://blippi.gg/ https://blippi.gg/
    - novok 6y ago
      When I last tried it wasn't as responsive, which made playing it annoying and I don't want to play melee, but the current ultimate version.
      - CarVac 6y ago
        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…
        novok 6y ago
        No as in I tried melee gamecube vs melee emulated and the responsiveness gap was enough to make it not enjoyable.
        NoodleIncident 6y ago
        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.
lima 6y ago
They're terribly customer-unfriendly in general. 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.
- Slackwise 6y ago
  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.
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    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.
    - ascagnel_ 6y ago
      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.
jamespo 6y ago
Probably because the vast majority of people don't care about anything you've listed
Taylor_OD 6y ago
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.
- BlargMcLarg 6y ago
  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.
  - kiaulen 6y ago
    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.
BlargMcLarg 6y ago
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.
falcolas 6y ago
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).
- novok 6y ago
  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.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    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.
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      TBF, if you are studying cinema you kind of have to study Polanski, and many other problematic directors and actors.
vlunkr 6y ago
Most people still see Disney and fun and harmless don't they?
myHNAccount123 6y ago
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.
- kemayo 6y ago
  > 2). Copyright exists and generally must be enforced lest the holder wishes to lose their rights. You're thinking of trademarks. Copyright isn't affected by enforcement in the same way.
  - aerostable_slug 6y ago
    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).
- deleted 6y ago
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- delroth 6y ago
  > 1). This group of modders was planning on profiting from their hack That's wrong, or at least unsourced and unsupported by current facts. > 2). Copyright exists and generally must be enforced lest the holder wishes to lose their rights. That's also wrong.
- kemonocode 6y ago
  You're conflating copyright with trademarks, they're not the same thing.
- bitwize 6y ago
  > 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.
SimeVidas 6y ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Maybe if you view your relationship with your mother with the same lens as a business transaction. Otherwise, it’s not.
  - EpicEng 6y ago
    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.
    - kiaulen 6y ago
      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).
- deleted 6y ago
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solinent 6y ago
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.
znpy 6y ago
Praising nintendo is almost meme-worthy. 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. I hope he's fine.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  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.
  - iamatworknow 6y ago
    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.
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    If only there was a way to enjoy their games without supporting the assholes behind it...
Xelbair 6y ago
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.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  Do you play games? People care more about quality games than a hardware region lock or an online service. Add another HN dropbox comment to the list
  - Xelbair 6y ago
    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.
tomc1985 6y ago
Is it any different from Disney? The parody from outh Park's Mickey Mouse episodes didn't come from thin air.
013a 6y ago
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.
- kiaulen 6y ago
  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.
mahoho 6y ago
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.
- Nomokis 6y ago
  > 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.
- sellyme 6y ago
  > 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.
ravenstine 6y ago
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)
- chaosharmonic 6y ago
  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.
dmart 6y ago
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).
eikenberry 6y ago
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.
- ED_Radish 6y ago
  Didn't nintendo lobby to make game rentals illegal in Japan at least?
  - eikenberry 6y ago
    I hadn't heard this but, if true, it would definitely be a black mark on their record.
Andrex 6y ago
> 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_group_efforts_against_file_sharing#Lawsuits_against_individuals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_group_efforts_against_fi...
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> 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.
ginko 6y ago
If anything Nintendo has mellowed out since the Yamauchi days.
watwut 6y ago
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. No one cares about rest.

colejohnson66 6y ago

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.

sli 6y ago

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.

vlunkr 6y ago
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.
- CarVac 6y ago
  They canceled the stream for a Splatoon 2 tournament because the players had names supportive of Melee. And the sexual misconduct was mainly in the Ultimate scene. Very few prominent Melee players were involved.
- mactrey 6y ago
  OP is referring to Nintendo cancelling a Splatoon tournament because competitors were using the #FreeMelee hashtag https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/12/nintendo_cancels_splatoon_2_na_open_livestream_free_melee_believed_to_have_played_a_part https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/12/nintendo_cancels_s...
  - vlunkr 6y ago
    Even the article states that's just speculation. > There were no further details, but some fans seem to think they might know what's going on...
- NoodleIncident 6y ago
  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.
novok 6y ago
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)
- CarVac 6y ago
  You can: https://blippi.gg/ https://blippi.gg/
  - novok 6y ago
    When I last tried it wasn't as responsive, which made playing it annoying and I don't want to play melee, but the current ultimate version.
    - CarVac 6y ago
      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…
      - novok 6y ago
        No as in I tried melee gamecube vs melee emulated and the responsiveness gap was enough to make it not enjoyable.
        NoodleIncident 6y ago
        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.

lima 6y ago

They're terribly customer-unfriendly in general. 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.

Slackwise 6y ago
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.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  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.
  - ascagnel_ 6y ago
    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.

jamespo 6y ago

Probably because the vast majority of people don't care about anything you've listed

Taylor_OD 6y ago

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.

BlargMcLarg 6y ago
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.
- kiaulen 6y ago
  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.

BlargMcLarg 6y ago

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.

falcolas 6y ago

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).

novok 6y ago
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.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  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.
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    TBF, if you are studying cinema you kind of have to study Polanski, and many other problematic directors and actors.

vlunkr 6y ago

Most people still see Disney and fun and harmless don't they?

myHNAccount123 6y ago

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.

kemayo 6y ago
> 2). Copyright exists and generally must be enforced lest the holder wishes to lose their rights. You're thinking of trademarks. Copyright isn't affected by enforcement in the same way.
- aerostable_slug 6y ago
  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).
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delroth 6y ago
> 1). This group of modders was planning on profiting from their hack That's wrong, or at least unsourced and unsupported by current facts. > 2). Copyright exists and generally must be enforced lest the holder wishes to lose their rights. That's also wrong.
kemonocode 6y ago
You're conflating copyright with trademarks, they're not the same thing.
bitwize 6y ago
> 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.

SimeVidas 6y ago

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.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
Maybe if you view your relationship with your mother with the same lens as a business transaction. Otherwise, it’s not.
- EpicEng 6y ago
  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.
  - kiaulen 6y ago
    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).
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solinent 6y ago

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.

znpy 6y ago

Praising nintendo is almost meme-worthy. 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. I hope he's fine.

ehsankia 6y ago
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.
- iamatworknow 6y ago
  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.
- Nullabillity 6y ago
  If only there was a way to enjoy their games without supporting the assholes behind it...

Xelbair 6y ago

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.

ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
Do you play games? People care more about quality games than a hardware region lock or an online service. Add another HN dropbox comment to the list
- Xelbair 6y ago
  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.

tomc1985 6y ago

Is it any different from Disney? The parody from outh Park's Mickey Mouse episodes didn't come from thin air.

013a 6y ago

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.

kiaulen 6y ago
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.

mahoho 6y ago

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.

Nomokis 6y ago
> 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.
sellyme 6y ago
> 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.

ravenstine 6y ago

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)

chaosharmonic 6y ago
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.

dmart 6y ago

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).

eikenberry 6y ago

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.

ED_Radish 6y ago
Didn't nintendo lobby to make game rentals illegal in Japan at least?
- eikenberry 6y ago
  I hadn't heard this but, if true, it would definitely be a black mark on their record.

Andrex 6y ago

> 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_group_efforts_against_file_sharing#Lawsuits_against_individuals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_group_efforts_against_fi...

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

> 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.

ginko 6y ago

If anything Nintendo has mellowed out since the Yamauchi days.

watwut 6y ago

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. No one cares about rest.