5 ms·

There’s an interesting shift in perspective that’s been happening around Nintendo over the last decade. While the organization still presents as an odd-ball Ja

by xattt 2y ago

There’s an interesting shift in perspective that’s been happening around Nintendo over the last decade. While the organization still presents as an odd-ball Japanese company with quirky qualities, it’s becoming more and more apparent they are commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to protect as much IP as possible, and squeeze out the last penny from fun. Things I’ve purchased from them in the last little while are probably at my high-end of tolerance of what things should cost.

ericzawo 2y ago
Their hatred for some of their most loyal fans vis a vis their punishment for sharing content, running tournaments and keeping game legacy alive is so brazen it would make entities like the NFL and Ticketmaster jump for joy.
- decae 2y ago
  I wouldn't say it's hatred, they're just extremely risk adverse - every situation needs to be entered with caution. It seems to be common across a wide range of Japanese companies. Recently, there is a certain amount of Disneyesque revenue maximization that seems to be going on though, and keeping control of legacy titles is a part of that for sure.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    Every time Nintendo tries to set foot in the competitive scene or permit tournaments, this happens. https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/hjfv0y/summary_of_sexual_and_nonsexual_allegations/ https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/hjfv0y/summary_o... I don't blame them for trying to keep out. It would seem that professional Smash players are not to be assumed as stable people.
  - mrandish 2y ago
    Yes, they're risk adverse but in the last couple of years, Nintendo has also become much more legally expansive than they were. Of course, Nintendo has long been legally aggressive, especially in protecting their trademarks ("Super Mario" et al) but the expansiveness is both new and deeply problematic. It was fine when Nintendo was legally aggressive suing unlicensed Super Mario T-shirt makers but in the past couple of years they're going just as aggressively after retro fan and preservation communities and other non-profit, minor players who they previously mostly ignored. This change was a conscious decision and makes little sense because these new targets have always tangentially infringed some IP rights but never in ways that had measurable financial impact on Nintendo's current core products. And, arguably, retro preservation and fan communities are net positive for Nintendo's brand. Even notoriously litigious companies like Disney choose to selectively turn a blind eye to cosplayers in Marvel super hero capes. Threatening or suing your hardest core, most loyal brand fans for doing things that didn't make them money or cost you money (at least rounded to the nearest $100) is not only a waste of resources, it's actively bad for your brand. This has turned me from generally positive toward Nintendo to literally hating the brand. Sure, doing this is technically within their rights but it's just being shitty and there's no compelling reason they had to change from being selectively reasonable to "full-on asshole" toward their fans.
    - bzzzt 2y ago
      Nintendo isn't changing, the world around it is. 15 years ago there were no youtubers who built a business around pasting a talking head over a video game stream. It seems nobody even asks Nintendo if they are ok with that and now people are angry because the answer turned out to be 'no'. That's not how copyright works. The emulator authors who made millions by accepting donations with the explicit promise of facilitating piracy of the latest Nintendo games still for sale also should have known better. There's a lot of hate for Nintendo right now, but imo it's all on entitled gamers who want stuff that Nintendo created for free. There's no company that can safisfy those demands and stay in business.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  On the other hand they still sell new game cube controllers. Upgraded even from the old ones with a longer cord. They didn’t have to do that. They could have said screw you buy a pro controller. At least for that one product there was a hint of sympathy for the competitive smash community.
bluefirebrand 2y ago
> commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to protect as much IP as possible, and squeeze out the last penny from fun I'm not really sure how you can look at the state of the modern gaming industry, full of gacha/loot box and cosmetic microtransactions and suggest that Nintendo is somehow trying to squeeze pennies when they are one of the least egregious offenders in this area In a world where Fortnite and Mobile games are vacuuming cash directly from peoples wallets, you're mad at Nintendo who is still releasing games you can just own? Please help me understand
- xattt 2y ago
  Nintendo had a conventional approach to gaming for a number of years. No microtransactions, skins, etc. In the last decade, they’ve been aggressively pursuing emulator hobbyists and “making deals they couldn’t refuse” (Yuzu). Recently, they started offering a “soundtrack” app as part of the benefits of Nintendo Online where you can listen to music from their first-party games. I see this as an administrative move to demonstrate active marketing of their properties, to delay their copyrights lapse (similar to Disney bringing Steamboat Willy to try to preserve a 100-year-old copyright). Also see the Switch 2 tech demo app being sold rather than included. Can you imagine if Microsoft charged for the Windows XP tour, or Apple for the Tips app? There is not one single aspect I can point to that makes you say “gotcha”, but micro-aggressions against fans seem to be adding up and tipping the scale away from a company that gives warm, fuzzy feelings deserving of fandom.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    I don't know, I actually do somewhat get it. If there is a product, you pay for the product. People do not respect, or value, things they do not pay for. Steve Jobs had a similar philosophy with refusing to offer free meals at Apple - subsidized meals was okay, free meals was not okay. Having worked in a small business, I have seen painfully firsthand how giving customers free things almost always backfires and just creates extremely demanding customers. Look at how demanding customers are of Nintendo right now that the Welcome Tour be free; even though they would not be demanding it if Nintendo had just not made the Welcome Tour at all. They would be literally happier and less demanding if it had never been made, which is backwards. On that note; Nintendo does have to somewhat be cautious about their intellectual property in ways other companies do not. We like to think of things as Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo; but this is an illusion. Apple makes four times as much money per year from mobile gaming than Nintendo does in entirety. Xbox and PlayStation have plenty of fallback cash from the rest of their respective companies; Nintendo is the smallest of the three and has no fallback option.
numpad0 2y ago
You don't know what "MBA-type" is.
- xattt 2y ago
  Maybe, but do you have a term for someone that makes decisions based on spreadsheets, market surveys, and maxing out profits while ignoring years of goodwill from fans?
  - skyyler 2y ago
    If they were making decisions based on maxing out profits, there would be a Mario Wonder Battle Pass and the gacha mechanics in the new zelda would include microtransactions. Mario Kart for $80 is not MBA stuff, even if it makes the gamers really upset.
    - egypturnash 2y ago
      According to online calculators, $20 in 1980 dollars is worth about $80 today. $77.something to be precise, close enough. I chose 1980 because that's when Space Invaders came out for the VCS. And $20 was, IIRC, the going rate for the average VCS cartridge.
      - skyyler 2y ago
        For a more direct comparison, Mario Kart: Double Dash!! came out in 2003 on the Nintendo Gamecube, at an MSRP of $49.99. That is $86 in today money.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    The guys you don't mess with.
seventhtiger 2y ago
Japanese game companies are a lot more protective about their IP. Nintendo is simply consistent about that in the West. To them it's quite normal to exercise a lot of control over how your work is presented in public, which includes things like tournaments, emulation, fan games, mods, and so on. A Japanese Youtuber was arrested for posting spoilers of a visual novel: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-authorities-make-their-first-arrest-over-video-game-spoilers https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-authorities-make-thei...
kjkjadksj 2y ago
When you start getting familiar with other japanese companies you realize its not that nintendo is fake “japanese” and has this mba side, its that they are japanese through and through including getting hard up on ip. This sort of thing plagues any japanese company I am familiar with. Car companies. Fujifilm. Same thing. Market on “creative, different, japanese” but its really a locked down product with artificial moats they put in to protect their incremental upgrade models. When you realize the potential of what these sorts of companies could do you get a little sad of the route they instead trot down. For example fujifilm is resting on their laurels during the modern film resurgeance. They have stopped making film for the american market and let kodak make it for them and slap their logo on it. Every film lab in the world worth their salt still uses their 30 year old Fronteir scanning system because there is literally nothing better made as film industry investment fell off a cliff 30 years ago and large scale engineering efforts in that sector ended. And of course the cameras. Everyone is using an old slowly dying film camera because they don’t make new ones. And fujifilm had some of the best of the best in their “texas leica” medium format cameras. It is like civilization died in this sector and we are living off the scraps of what was left from the great civilization. Why does fuji do this? Avoiding their seat on the throne in this growing newfound industry? Because hubris. They are japanese. They made the decision to forget about film and they are set on it damnit. They don’t want to cannibalize the sales of their modern day digital cameras (even though they probably won’t). They have a good thing going where they increment features on a couple hundred dollar camera bodies. What they don’t realize is the film buffs today probably pay vastly more in film than digital shooters pay upgrading their camera bodies a year on average. So much money left on the table just totally obsinate reasons for leaving it too that boil down to a certain hubris you see in japanese companies. Don’t even get me started on Toyota.
wan23 2y ago
If that's the case, imagine if you were trying to buy games back in the SNES days. The cost for many new games was the same or higher in absolute dollars as today, but much higher if you do the calculation to 2025 dollars.
jjice 2y ago
As a long time Nintendo fan, I've always joked with my friends that the people who design the games are incredibly talented and passionate, and the people that run the business throws all of that good will alone. They've had the worst online stores for a while now. They're not up nearly as long as Microsoft and Sony have kept their older console's stores around, and they've been hostile with transfers too. I remember playing N64 games on the Wii for $10 a pop. Then, if I recall, the Wii U didn't support the N64 games and then the Switch didn't until a few years ago, all under a $50 per year subscription and a much smaller library. The business side of Nintendo has been brutal for a while. It's a shame they make some of the best games...
- rightbyte 2y ago
  > They've had the worst online stores for a while now. Oh I see that as a feature. I buy Switch games over disk.
  - jjice 2y ago
    Absolutely - I only buy physical for Nintendo. Seems like they’re going to be attempting to make a move away from that from what I’ve heard. Something about physical boxes just having download codes instead of a cart for some Switch 2 games?
rightbyte 2y ago
Have you played Super Mario Odyssey? They are not copy pasting SM64.

by xattt 2y ago

ericzawo 2y ago

Their hatred for some of their most loyal fans vis a vis their punishment for sharing content, running tournaments and keeping game legacy alive is so brazen it would make entities like the NFL and Ticketmaster jump for joy.

decae 2y ago
I wouldn't say it's hatred, they're just extremely risk adverse - every situation needs to be entered with caution. It seems to be common across a wide range of Japanese companies. Recently, there is a certain amount of Disneyesque revenue maximization that seems to be going on though, and keeping control of legacy titles is a part of that for sure.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  Every time Nintendo tries to set foot in the competitive scene or permit tournaments, this happens. https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/hjfv0y/summary_of_sexual_and_nonsexual_allegations/ https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/hjfv0y/summary_o... I don't blame them for trying to keep out. It would seem that professional Smash players are not to be assumed as stable people.
- mrandish 2y ago
  Yes, they're risk adverse but in the last couple of years, Nintendo has also become much more legally expansive than they were. Of course, Nintendo has long been legally aggressive, especially in protecting their trademarks ("Super Mario" et al) but the expansiveness is both new and deeply problematic. It was fine when Nintendo was legally aggressive suing unlicensed Super Mario T-shirt makers but in the past couple of years they're going just as aggressively after retro fan and preservation communities and other non-profit, minor players who they previously mostly ignored. This change was a conscious decision and makes little sense because these new targets have always tangentially infringed some IP rights but never in ways that had measurable financial impact on Nintendo's current core products. And, arguably, retro preservation and fan communities are net positive for Nintendo's brand. Even notoriously litigious companies like Disney choose to selectively turn a blind eye to cosplayers in Marvel super hero capes. Threatening or suing your hardest core, most loyal brand fans for doing things that didn't make them money or cost you money (at least rounded to the nearest $100) is not only a waste of resources, it's actively bad for your brand. This has turned me from generally positive toward Nintendo to literally hating the brand. Sure, doing this is technically within their rights but it's just being shitty and there's no compelling reason they had to change from being selectively reasonable to "full-on asshole" toward their fans.
  - bzzzt 2y ago
    Nintendo isn't changing, the world around it is. 15 years ago there were no youtubers who built a business around pasting a talking head over a video game stream. It seems nobody even asks Nintendo if they are ok with that and now people are angry because the answer turned out to be 'no'. That's not how copyright works. The emulator authors who made millions by accepting donations with the explicit promise of facilitating piracy of the latest Nintendo games still for sale also should have known better. There's a lot of hate for Nintendo right now, but imo it's all on entitled gamers who want stuff that Nintendo created for free. There's no company that can safisfy those demands and stay in business.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
On the other hand they still sell new game cube controllers. Upgraded even from the old ones with a longer cord. They didn’t have to do that. They could have said screw you buy a pro controller. At least for that one product there was a hint of sympathy for the competitive smash community.

bluefirebrand 2y ago

> commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to protect as much IP as possible, and squeeze out the last penny from fun I'm not really sure how you can look at the state of the modern gaming industry, full of gacha/loot box and cosmetic microtransactions and suggest that Nintendo is somehow trying to squeeze pennies when they are one of the least egregious offenders in this area In a world where Fortnite and Mobile games are vacuuming cash directly from peoples wallets, you're mad at Nintendo who is still releasing games you can just own? Please help me understand

xattt 2y ago
Nintendo had a conventional approach to gaming for a number of years. No microtransactions, skins, etc. In the last decade, they’ve been aggressively pursuing emulator hobbyists and “making deals they couldn’t refuse” (Yuzu). Recently, they started offering a “soundtrack” app as part of the benefits of Nintendo Online where you can listen to music from their first-party games. I see this as an administrative move to demonstrate active marketing of their properties, to delay their copyrights lapse (similar to Disney bringing Steamboat Willy to try to preserve a 100-year-old copyright). Also see the Switch 2 tech demo app being sold rather than included. Can you imagine if Microsoft charged for the Windows XP tour, or Apple for the Tips app? There is not one single aspect I can point to that makes you say “gotcha”, but micro-aggressions against fans seem to be adding up and tipping the scale away from a company that gives warm, fuzzy feelings deserving of fandom.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  I don't know, I actually do somewhat get it. If there is a product, you pay for the product. People do not respect, or value, things they do not pay for. Steve Jobs had a similar philosophy with refusing to offer free meals at Apple - subsidized meals was okay, free meals was not okay. Having worked in a small business, I have seen painfully firsthand how giving customers free things almost always backfires and just creates extremely demanding customers. Look at how demanding customers are of Nintendo right now that the Welcome Tour be free; even though they would not be demanding it if Nintendo had just not made the Welcome Tour at all. They would be literally happier and less demanding if it had never been made, which is backwards. On that note; Nintendo does have to somewhat be cautious about their intellectual property in ways other companies do not. We like to think of things as Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo; but this is an illusion. Apple makes four times as much money per year from mobile gaming than Nintendo does in entirety. Xbox and PlayStation have plenty of fallback cash from the rest of their respective companies; Nintendo is the smallest of the three and has no fallback option.

numpad0 2y ago

You don't know what "MBA-type" is.

xattt 2y ago
Maybe, but do you have a term for someone that makes decisions based on spreadsheets, market surveys, and maxing out profits while ignoring years of goodwill from fans?
- skyyler 2y ago
  If they were making decisions based on maxing out profits, there would be a Mario Wonder Battle Pass and the gacha mechanics in the new zelda would include microtransactions. Mario Kart for $80 is not MBA stuff, even if it makes the gamers really upset.
  - egypturnash 2y ago
    According to online calculators, $20 in 1980 dollars is worth about $80 today. $77.something to be precise, close enough. I chose 1980 because that's when Space Invaders came out for the VCS. And $20 was, IIRC, the going rate for the average VCS cartridge.
    - skyyler 2y ago
      For a more direct comparison, Mario Kart: Double Dash!! came out in 2003 on the Nintendo Gamecube, at an MSRP of $49.99. That is $86 in today money.
- numpad0 2y ago
  The guys you don't mess with.

seventhtiger 2y ago

Japanese game companies are a lot more protective about their IP. Nintendo is simply consistent about that in the West. To them it's quite normal to exercise a lot of control over how your work is presented in public, which includes things like tournaments, emulation, fan games, mods, and so on. A Japanese Youtuber was arrested for posting spoilers of a visual novel: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-authorities-make-their-first-arrest-over-video-game-spoilers https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-authorities-make-thei...

kjkjadksj 2y ago

When you start getting familiar with other japanese companies you realize its not that nintendo is fake “japanese” and has this mba side, its that they are japanese through and through including getting hard up on ip. This sort of thing plagues any japanese company I am familiar with. Car companies. Fujifilm. Same thing. Market on “creative, different, japanese” but its really a locked down product with artificial moats they put in to protect their incremental upgrade models. When you realize the potential of what these sorts of companies could do you get a little sad of the route they instead trot down. For example fujifilm is resting on their laurels during the modern film resurgeance. They have stopped making film for the american market and let kodak make it for them and slap their logo on it. Every film lab in the world worth their salt still uses their 30 year old Fronteir scanning system because there is literally nothing better made as film industry investment fell off a cliff 30 years ago and large scale engineering efforts in that sector ended. And of course the cameras. Everyone is using an old slowly dying film camera because they don’t make new ones. And fujifilm had some of the best of the best in their “texas leica” medium format cameras. It is like civilization died in this sector and we are living off the scraps of what was left from the great civilization. Why does fuji do this? Avoiding their seat on the throne in this growing newfound industry? Because hubris. They are japanese. They made the decision to forget about film and they are set on it damnit. They don’t want to cannibalize the sales of their modern day digital cameras (even though they probably won’t). They have a good thing going where they increment features on a couple hundred dollar camera bodies. What they don’t realize is the film buffs today probably pay vastly more in film than digital shooters pay upgrading their camera bodies a year on average. So much money left on the table just totally obsinate reasons for leaving it too that boil down to a certain hubris you see in japanese companies. Don’t even get me started on Toyota.

wan23 2y ago

If that's the case, imagine if you were trying to buy games back in the SNES days. The cost for many new games was the same or higher in absolute dollars as today, but much higher if you do the calculation to 2025 dollars.

jjice 2y ago

As a long time Nintendo fan, I've always joked with my friends that the people who design the games are incredibly talented and passionate, and the people that run the business throws all of that good will alone. They've had the worst online stores for a while now. They're not up nearly as long as Microsoft and Sony have kept their older console's stores around, and they've been hostile with transfers too. I remember playing N64 games on the Wii for $10 a pop. Then, if I recall, the Wii U didn't support the N64 games and then the Switch didn't until a few years ago, all under a $50 per year subscription and a much smaller library. The business side of Nintendo has been brutal for a while. It's a shame they make some of the best games...

rightbyte 2y ago
> They've had the worst online stores for a while now. Oh I see that as a feature. I buy Switch games over disk.
- jjice 2y ago
  Absolutely - I only buy physical for Nintendo. Seems like they’re going to be attempting to make a move away from that from what I’ve heard. Something about physical boxes just having download codes instead of a cart for some Switch 2 games?

rightbyte 2y ago

Have you played Super Mario Odyssey? They are not copy pasting SM64.