At some point, getting Nintendo would be a career moment and I honestly believe a good move for both companies. It’s just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time… :-)
Micrsoft’s gaming head honchos were talking about making a monopoly. And it’s clearly the goal. They don’t care about gamers or games just hurting Sony (they said their main goal was to kill Playstation). The ActiBlizz acquire showed them they can buy anyone. Monopolies of any kind are bad, and this would be horrible.
There is no such thing as a company that cares about the product they make or the people who buy their product. The purpose of every company is solely to make money. The product itself is, to some degree, arbitrary. The only reason Microsoft even makes video games is because it’s adjacent, and in some ways a natural extension of, their original business.
This is especially true of publicly traded companies.
A publicly traded company's customers are it's investors, and it's product is shareholder value. Everything else they do is just the manufacturing process.
This is too broad of a brushstroke. Is there any megacorporation that cares about its customers? Doubt it. But are plenty of small studios that clearly value the quality of their product.
Nintendo does care about making good games, or it wouldn't make all the weird moves that it does, and it wouldn't consistently output quality titles like it does. We are just so used to dispassionate money leeches controlling everything that the idea that anyone in charge cares about anything but money seems hard to believe.
Which is all the more reason why Microsoft can't be allowed to acquire it.
Yes I know. But I wanted to make a general statement instead of typing out all the realities of corporations in our end stage capitalist hellscape. Typing on my phone is hard lol
It seems like it there might be a number of updates about the FTC leak, but the notable highlights of this email from me are the plotted purchases of Nintendo and WB Games.
The way they discuss the purchase of Nintendo as if it is an inevitability and how they may need to purchase it in a hostile manner really cements to me that they are utilizing Microsoft’s immense capital to obtain a gaming monopoly.
I know it is an unpopular position because of how beloved a Gamepass is, but this really solidifies how shady Xbox/ Microsoft is; and I really hope the acquisition of ActiBlizz is blocked.
Why wouldn’t it happen for Game Pass? It’s happened for every new service. Start them with a great deal to undermine all competition because you can eat the cost and they can’t. When the competition dies, slowly start enshittifying it, until it’s as bad or worse than the original. Arguably Microsoft is already starting that process by killing off the $1 demo.
Microsoft isn’t going to pass up free money, and if anything this email conversation confirms that they’re drooling, waiting for the “fuck them over the barrel” stage.
It's not happening for Game Pass because they're not in a position of strength to exploit. Nintendo is. Unity thought they were. Streaming video services all raised prices, and plenty of them are still offering value to customers at those prices, but I know that I cancelled two of mine in response; and streaming video services have at least four major players, which is more competition than the business they replaced (cable) ever saw. The $1 trial was always a teaser rate to show people the value they can get out of Game Pass. It's not for me, but the numbers make a lot of sense for a lot of people. Contrast that to Nintendo, who is in a position of strength, only offers their retro games for a subscription on their shitty hardware on their shitty emulators and sues everyone for offering them by other means, and I know which one I dislike more.
It’s not happening for Game Pass right now. If Microsoft hoovered up Nintendo and all the other companies, leaving Game Pass with little competition, they’d flip in an instant. Then you’d have not only Nintendo games for an overpriced subscription, you’d have Nintendo and everything else Microsoft bought for an overpriced subscription, where Microsoft can do whatever they want because only they have the rights to those games.
I’m not arguing Nintendo’s subscription services doesn’t suck ass, I’m arguing that Microsoft would do the same thing if they got their mits on Nintendo’s catalog, except potentially worse because they have more ‘exclusive content’ to lock-away in their garden and they can force their BS into Windows.
If Microsoft hoovered up Nintendo and all the other companies, leaving Game Pass with little competition, they’d flip in an instant.
And if I had $100B, I'd buy Nintendo, but Microsoft can't buy out that much of the video game market either, especially after Activision got through by the skin of their teeth. Activision happened because Nintendo didn't.
Nintendo is bad for game ownership right now. Live service games like Diablo IV are bad for game ownership right now. I don't care what Game Pass might be one day. The second it becomes that, you can guarantee I'll turn on it.
...potentially worse because they have more ‘exclusive content’ to lock-away in their garden and they can force their BS into Windows.
I'm a Linux guy. I was fearful of this for a long time, but it didn't take, and Microsoft clearly abandoned that strategy of trying to make the Windows Store happen for games. Even Microsoft couldn't force you to give them a larger cut of the PC gaming pie. Right now, they're struggling to increase Game Pass numbers beyond their ~30M subscribers even after they've added numerous publishers and developers to their catalogue in perpetuity, because, to my surprise, people can do math. The ones that the math works out for is probably not much larger than that 30M.
Sony is in a dominant position in the market. Xbox doesn't threaten them hardly at all. Even Sony isn't keeping games entirely exclusive anymore, probably because enough people like me did the math and found out that 4 exclusive games isn't worth having a $500 machine collect dust next to our TVs, so now their games get PC ports. These business models only turn to shit if you let them. We can live without all of them, so they're all optional. Don't give them money when they offer a bad product, and we'll only get better products.
Boy would I love to see Nintendo's future in the hands of anyone except Nintendo. That's the only way their future will be off their own hardware, and probably the only way they become less of a barrier to game preservation. For those of you afraid of Microsoft absorbing Nintendo and becoming a monopoly, check the date on that e-mail and rest assured they can't get away with it anymore anyway.
@ampersandrew@UrLogicFails for better or worse Nintendo does things their own way. You can bet you'd see yearly mario kart releases if that IP belonged to anyone else, and I don't think that would be for the better.
Is that the worst thing you can think of? Because that sounds like more than an acceptable trade if it meant that I could legally buy a ROM of Super Metroid I could play on my Steam Deck, or if I could legally play Tears of the Kingdom on a machine that can run it at 60 FPS, or if the first F-Zero game made in 20 years wasn't a live service battle royale with an expiration date baked into the game.
@ampersandrew@UrLogicFails worst thing I could think of would be yearly bland releases barely worth playing and gutting the innovation they bring.
It's not like every release is brilliant or great (looking at you pokemon violet/scarlet), but look at what happened to Blizzard pre and post acquisition.
I already think Mario Kart is bland and not worth playing, so you'll need a harder sell for me. Also, the yearly release model is just about dead these days; very few can pull it off still, and it tends to not be as lucrative as just making DLC for one major version at a time, like Nintendo is already doing now with Mario Kart. The truth is, at this point, I don't care what kind of quality Nintendo's games are made with if they're sticking to the business practices they're using currently. I haven't bought Tears of the Kingdom or even pirated it. My time and money are better spent with companies making better products.
@ampersandrew@UrLogicFails better is subjective for sure. But if you got a list of better games I can play with my 5 year old, I'm honestly all ears. So far nothing is beating Mario Odyssey and Pokémon Eevee.
Preservation wise and business practice wise I'm also not sure of anyone is 'good', but I'd again be more than happy to be better educated on the subject.
You can sit a 5 year old in front of all sorts of games that they'd enjoy, but Mario and Pokemon is what they've been exposed to, by you or friends or both. You'll have a difficult time arguing with them over the importance of how your individual market actions have lasting effects on what gets produced; that's true. But Nintendo only has a monopoly on marketing kid-friendly games, not producing them...not that that will matter to your 5 year old.
As for preservation, server dependencies are bad. F-Zero 99 requires a server and a subscription to be played, full stop. That game will not survive, and other battle royales or even other "99" games are already being decommissioned and will cease to exist. Online multiplayer can still exist without server dependencies, via private servers or LAN or direct IP connection; these features are becoming increasingly rare for business reasons, so keep your eye out for them. Without these features, multiplayer will disappear at some point. DRM is bad. While it often doesn't bother people who purchase legitimately, sometimes it does, including long after the initial release period, if that DRM hasn't been patched out, because the company authorizing the DRM usually doesn't care about the repercussions of it two decades from now. Baldur's Gate 3, not a game to play with your 5 year old for at least another decade, has all of those multiplayer features and is available DRM-free. BG3 will be preserved. The gold standard for preservation is open source, where anyone can view the code and change it, which means it will always run on whatever computers we use in the future. This is why Doom is ported to everything with a screen and an input device. But open sourcing your game is a hard sell for developers.
@ampersandrew@UrLogicFails okay but how is Nintendo worse than other companies in that regard? Is microsoft or Sony better at the preservation than them in some way I don't understand? Are they better companies to support in that metric?
As for the kid thing, they don't really get much pick in the matter of what game I let them try yet. It's just that I can't FIND any games outside of Nintendos stuff that is quality and fun for the family. It's mostly poor quality IP tie ins. I've looked!
how is Nintendo worse than other companies in that regard? Is microsoft or Sony better at the preservation than them in some way I don't understand? Are they better companies to support in that metric?
Both of them make PC ports now, which are automatically better for preservation, since PC is an open platform rather than a walled garden. Neither is perfect. They both put out live service games that are bad for preservation. But Microsoft especially is better at making their back catalog available for purchase years and years after release. Nintendo hunts down ROM sites and gets them shut down but won't make their old games available in a state that their potential customers are willing to pay for them.
As for the kid thing, they don't really get much pick in the matter of what game I let them try yet. It's just that I can't FIND any games outside of Nintendos stuff that is quality and fun for the family. It's mostly poor quality IP tie ins. I've looked!
Cassette Beasts (like Pokemon)
Lego <just about anything>
Overcooked and Overcooked 2 (it could be difficult for your kid at 5, but it might also be fun to play together depending on how they take to it)
Penny's Big Breakaway (upcoming, from the Sonic Mania team; 3D platformer)
Poi (I have no experience with this one myself, but I hear positive comparisons to Super Mario 64)
Sonic + All-Stars Racing Transformed
Sonic Mania
Do the kids still like Spongebob? There's that new Spongebob: The Cosmic Shake. That one's licensed, but I hear it's quality enough. It's also a 3D platformer.
Stardew Valley
Yooka-Laylee (admittedly, this one got middling reviews, but I liked it more than most people; 3D platformer)
Not even Microsoft is selling ROMs, at most they make their older games retrocompatible on console. From one locked device to another. At that point you might as well dump your old Nintendo games and the result is the same.
Their new games come out on PC day and date, and they haven't released a console-only game since Rare Replay, if I'm not mistaken. "ROMs" are a little before Microsoft's time, if we're being honest.
Sure, but if you are talking about Super Metroid ROMs, you are talking legacy releases, and Microsoft didn't bother to rerelease their classic XBox games on PC, so there's no reason to assume they would do it to SNES games if they acquired Nintendo.
Well, there is, because SNES emulation is trivial, and Xbox emulation is much less so. Great SNES emulation is available open source and in many different flavors with many different features, and all you need to do is supply the ROM, preferably in a legal way. Most of Xbox's best games already have PC ports, and Microsoft's shift to supporting PC equally is as recent as only a handful of years ago. Especially in the interest of making the Game Pass offering more uniform across PC and Xbox, they still may yet backport those remaining Xbox games to PC in some way just like they ported Age of Empires II to console. Meanwhile, I have no prayer of Nintendo releasing their games on an open platform like PC unless they have an extreme change of leadership or another extreme failure in the market akin to the Wii U.
The newer XBox consoles are x86 architecture devices with an operating system that is similar to Windows. If they can maintain retrocompatibility with older titles, that means they have a functioning emulator or compatibility layer for classic XBox and 360 games. It would be trivial for Microsoft to release them for PC but they don't seem interested in doing that. Whatever obstacles there may be there, they are not technical. Considering that, it's unlikely that they would take a different approach regarding older Nintendo titles.
The example of Age of Empires II if anything indicates that they want to have a console-centric approach towards older titles. So, it's just speculation to assume that Microsoft acquiring Nintendo would lead to their games being ported to PC. On the flipside, I'd be more concerned that Microsoft's more inconsistent quality standards and monetization tendencies would make their way into Nintendo titles.
If they can maintain retrocompatibility with older titles, that means they have a functioning emulator or compatibility layer for classic XBox and 360 games. It would be trivial for Microsoft to release them for PC but they don't seem interested in doing that.
It also isn't trivial. They had to write custom emulation code for those old games, and they had to negotiate that with the rights holders in a lot of cases.
On the flipside, I'd be more concerned that Microsoft's more inconsistent quality standards and monetization tendencies would make their way into Nintendo titles.
Right, as opposed to the flawless technical quality of the latest Pokemon games and the impeccable business model of tying games with a killswitch behind a subscription model?
I'll just say again that, for me personally, I'd rather see almost anyone else run Nintendo, because they're a good chance I'd find that entity to be less shitty. But maybe the better alternative is for them to just screw up the successor to the Switch and take a bath on it financially.
It also isn't trivial. They had to write custom emulation code for those old games, and they had to negotiate that with the rights holders in a lot of cases.
All that applies to Nintendo titles, especially the latter. If they don't manage it for the titles they already have for which they already did the technical work, Nintendo on PC seems even more unlikely.
Right, as opposed to the flawless technical quality of the latest Pokemon games and the impeccable business model of tying games with a killswitch behind a subscription model?
I expected for you to bring up Pokémon, and in all fairness I agree that it was released in an unacceptable state. But I should remind you that The Pokémon Company and Game Freak are separate companies that work differently than other first-party Nintendo titles. Could you honestly tell me that Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Animal Crossing and all other Nintendo franchises are anything but excellent? People may have their preferences and dislikes about them, but it would be dishonest to say they aren't all finely crafted.
I agree with you as far as their attitude towards Mario 35, but what do you think is going to happen to Sea of Thieves once they decide to take the servers down? This is not something that Microsoft is going to fix, it's the pitfall of all live service games, and as time goes by gaming companies only seem to insist more on this direction.
I don't agree with Nintendo with everything, their online platforms are lacking, their closedness is disappointing, their litigiousness is often revolting, but I definitely wouldn't trust Microsoft or Sony to do better, even less any other gaming company.
I can tell you that I find the frame rate and resolution of Zelda to be unacceptable, given that they don't allow any option for that game to run on other hardware, legally. I've heard enough complaints from my girlfriend to know how little they cared about Animal Crossing in the online experience (a minute and a half connection screen every time someone joins your island!) or the UX (manually hitting A over and over to craft something thirty times that you should be able to do in bulk). Smash's online could have been done right this time, but they took the cheap way out instead of properly developing it with rollback. Their voice chat solution is to hook up your phone with an app and use it separately rather than baking it into the device's OS. I would call all of these poor quality and unacceptable.
I agree with you as far as their attitude towards Mario 35, but what do you think is going to happen to Sea of Thieves once they decide to take the servers down? This is not something that Microsoft is going to fix, it's the pitfall of all live service games, and as time goes by gaming companies only seem to insist more on this direction.
So then why does Microsoft frighten you when Nintendo already does the shitty thing of their own accord? The stuff they do with their online catalogue of retro games is the shitty thing no one else is doing. Remember that Microsoft had a great remaster of Goldeneye ready to go for 360 that Nintendo denied in the 11th hour, and when that game finally came out again, it's only available in subscription services rather than for purchase, both the Switch and Xbox versions were worse than that remaster, and only the Switch version had online play.
The only reason I trust Microsoft and Sony to do better, even by a smidge, is because they actually respond to market forces, and Nintendo would rather go bankrupt than sell you a ROM of Super Mario Bros. for $8 on PC. But Microsoft isn't acquiring them anyway. Buying Activision closed that door, so all of this is moot.
C'mon, I can't take it seriously if you are going to overblow it like this. Tears of the Kingdom is a marvel of engineering and losing sight of that because it's not running on the most powerful gaming hardware is a huge disservice to the work put into it. It's a superficial way to judge them and it only makes me give less credit to your opinion. It just make you sound like the sort of gamer who would prefer a hyper-realistic generic game running at 4K 60 FPS than anything with passion, who has no appreciation for a more modest game that is finely crafted.
Both Animal Crossing and Smash Ultimate too, like I said, the online is disappointing, but they are still excellent games both single-player and couch multiplayer. To call it "poor quality" and "unacceptable"? If you really mean it then I just don't trust your opinion. Listing such a small nitpick as Animal Crossing's UX in that is downright silly. All of these games are fun, beautiful and even technically impressive for a limited hardware like this.
This is not me being a blind fan. I have played plenty of Animal Crossing and I've seen those issues. There are things in it that I'd wish were expanded or brought back from previous entries, but I can put that into perspective, considering how much content in it is new or much more polished than before. To deem it "unacceptable" because of that, the person must not have played any real bad games.
I'm not keen on it but I'm also not overly concerned about how Nintendo offers older games now because I know how to get them. And so does anyone who really care about this really. As for Mario 35, I definitely don't like that, but this sort of approach is rare for them and left to smaller, niche projects. As opposed to Sea of Thieves which is the only thing we still hear of Rare in years. In fairness, I don't think it's an excuse, but I'll lament the loss of Sea of Thieves far more than those other games, especially considering I can still play Mario, F-Zero and Tetris regardless.
Microsoft and Sony responding to market forces is exactly why I want Nintendo out of their hands. Because if those two get a pass to rip off the player, they won't even hesitate. Look at Microsoft did to Forza. Bungie is now Sony's and look at what Destiny 2 is like. The market often leans towards cheap profiteering. Nintendo is maybe overly self-important, and for that reason it keeps trying to deliver quality with a self-respect that other companies are already shoving out of the door. With the exception of Pokémon, a Nintendo game is guaranteed to be a good game and a complete package.
Tears of the Kingdom is a marvel of engineering and losing sight of that because it's not running on the most powerful gaming hardware is a huge disservice to the work put into it.
I'm sure it would be a marvel of engineering if they got it working on the 3DS running at 15 FPS in 120p, but I don't find it acceptable to play at those specs either. They can put all sorts of work into making something unacceptable. If it sucks, it sucks. I frequently don't care about the biggest AAA releases, and it's not a requirement that every game I play pushes hardware to its limits. However, I do care about responsive controls, playing where I'm comfortable, and not having to squint to tell what I'm looking at. Making a game of the scope they targeted isn't comfortable for me on the only hardware they allow it to run on.
Both Animal Crossing and Smash Ultimate too, like I said, the online is disappointing, but they are still excellent games both single-player and couch multiplayer. To call it "poor quality" and "unacceptable"? If you really mean it then I just don't trust your opinion.
What is there to trust? It's my opinion, not yours, and you've played those games yourself to form your own opinion. Maybe you don't care about a best-case input delay of 6 frames in Smash or that extremely common actions in Animal Crossing that you'll be doing hundreds of times are made more tedious and add more downtime, but it has a huge effect on me and mine.
Market forces are currently driving a lot of games toward live service, planned obsolescence, and all that nonsense. Totally true. Bungie was fully capable of making a gross live service even when they weren't under pressure from Activision or Sony. But market forces are also going to eventually make them stop, as we're finally picking up momentum on customers pushing back against this sort of thing. With or without Pokemon, Nintendo's name on the box has never been a guarantee of a good game, and it's not true now either.
Well, overexaggeration aside, I still appreciate many 3DS games to this day. This rush for the latest and greatest is part of what fuels planned obsolescence. Really, it feels a little inconsistent to criticize them for how they offer older games if you can't bear a game that's even a little bit aged.
I can grant you that Nintendo online kind of sucks but offline Nintendo games tend to be some of the most responsive, due to not letting too much realism get in the way of game feel, as well as the most readable, due to clear contrast and vibrant colors. Zelda or any other, I can tell everything apart very easily in Nintendo games, either portable or a big screen. Something games with much higher resolution often fail to do. Excessive shading and clutter often gets in the way of readability in the Sony games I played, no matter how much more defined objects look.
I even agree preference-wise with the Animal Crossing criticism, making bait is kind of a chore, but I also understand that the game's design is deliberately intended to slow the player down. It is a chill game to take it easy, not a game to rush and optimize everything. This is not a flaw, it's a difference in intent. This is what I believe weakens your arguments the most, you can't seem to diferentiate from something you don't like and something done badly.
Something I dislike is bad. I dislike things because I subjectively find them to be bad. But don't confuse poor performance with being old. We've done 60 FPS long before 2017, but they didn't make it a priority for Zelda. They didn't even seem to care about making sure 30 FPS was stable. The game they made is too big for that hardware to ever hit that metric, or the native 720p that the Switch supports. Metroid Dread, on the other hand, doesn't break a sweat.
This is not a flaw, it's a difference in intent.
It's objectively a flaw in an interactive game to remove interactivity for a minute and a half on a frequent occurrence like someone joining or leaving an island, and I think you'd have a hard time finding someone who thinks manually crafting the same item 30 times in a row rather than being able to do it in bulk is somehow better for the vibe the game is going. It's not my preference for weapons to break as quickly as they do in Zelda, but at least I understand why they made that choice, and it's not a fault of the quality of the software. It would be objectively better for Smash Ultimate to have less input delay and be more responsive. People have measured it at 6 frames, and Street Fighter V had a rough time back when it had 8. 3 or 4 is manageable. The most responsive fighting games have 1 or 2.
I dislike good things. I dislike Dark Souls, a game made with vision and care that a lot of people love, because to me it looks ugly, feels clunky and just utterly miserable. But sometimes you have to understand that things are not made for you specifically. Yeah, subjectively it is bad for me, but it's also good overall, no matter what I feel about it.
If Tears of the Kingdom was a native 1080p 60 fps game, it wouldn't have a whole system of physics-based interactive modular devices. Game developers are amazed that Nintendo even managed to get such complex systems running. Of course it's more demanding than Metroid Dread, does anything in it even remotely compare? That game doesn't even need to render distant landscapes, it's all small rooms and predetermined backgrounds. Do you think that was a lack of wanting to make it happen?
Maybe if a new console comes along and it's ported to that it will run better and look better, but for now, everything it can do comes at a cost.
I already acknowledged and agreed with you that Nintendo's online is bad. But there's more to those games than that. Aside that aspect though, what about Smash's gameplay, visuals, music? It's not like that game is only playable online, and thank goodness for that.
What about the variety and detail of Animal Crafting's clothing and furniture, or the behaviors of the villagers, or how customizable is the island this time around?
I dislike good things. I dislike Dark Souls, a game made with vision and care that a lot of people love, because to me it looks ugly, feels clunky and just utterly miserable.
Ugly, clunky feeling, miserable games are things you'd find to be bad. You don't have to acknowledge that other people like it if you find it to be bad. You can just say you think it's bad, at least with a clarification of why, or understand that when I say something is bad, it doesn't mean you can't like it, especially since I clarified why. I'm not obligated to say that something is good just because other people like it.
If Tears of the Kingdom was a native 1080p 60 fps game, it wouldn't have a whole system of physics-based interactive modular devices.
It could on hardware that they don't legally allow me to run it on! And that they don't let me do so is bad.
Of course it's more demanding than Metroid Dread, does anything in it even remotely compare? That game doesn't even need to render distant landscapes, it's all small rooms and predetermined backgrounds. Do you think that was a lack of wanting to make it happen?
No, I said that it was for lack of designing a game that can run well on the hardware they restricted themselves to. And if we were still in the 2017 world where the Switch is the only way to play a game that demanding portably, or even here in 2023 where it would be the cheapest way to play a game that demanding portably, it would be acceptable, but not when it's the only way to play the game at all.
I love Smash. But I also don't live in a dorm room anymore, and online is the primary use case for most fighting games. I go to locals, but if I get my ass beat at a local and go home to practice, my way to practice it is to go online, and its online sucks. Having bad online in a multiplayer game these days is about as bad as not having subtitles in a story-driven game or missing any other standard feature. The input delay is also rough even when you play locally.
I'm not the target market for Animal Crossing, so don't worry about what I think of it. My girlfriend was the one who played it. I played that first one on the Gamecube, and even back then I eventually became a little grossed out by how they wanted to make that game a habit like mobile games do today by making you afraid of weeds piling up. I do feel pretty confident in evaluating how bad those two aspects are when I could frequently walk through the living room and see the same few flaws over and over again.
It could on hardware that they don't legally allow me to run it on! And that they don't let me do so is bad.
If Nintendo games weren't trying to sell you on a console, do you really think they'd be trying so hard?
I'm old enough to remember the Dreamcast era Sega and their output after that. Sega's software teams went fucking hard trying to create awesome new experiences that you could only get on Sega's console. Their output quality dropped considerably and they played it boringly safe after they dropped out of the console market.
It's interesting that your example is Dreamcast, because while every company that doesn't put out a console also has an incentive to make great games, this also shows that making great games isn't enough.
Kind of. A big part of Sega's situation is that they shot their reputation in the ass with a 12 gauge in the mid 90s. They were pumping out platforms left, right and center only to discontinue them within a year or two (Sega CD, 32X, Saturn).
Nintendo have been very careful not to make the same mistakes, but even then a lot of people initially had little faith in the Switch because of the WiiU. Even Gamefreak didn't want to release Pokémon games for Switch initially.
As for other companies, their goal is to make titles that sell well on the platforms it releases on. They can afford to rely almost completely on what has come before, all they need to do is do it well.
The goal of a first party game is to sell itself and the platform. So they need to be doing things that other games aren't, in order to sell the idea of 'you can only get this experience with platform X'.
Phil Spencer of Microsoft thinks this idea doesn't make sense because they haven't been doing it well in years. The big innovation with Halo Infinite is live services and an open world. Their exclusives aren't doing anything other games aren't.
Sony is a bit better and covers a few more genres, and if you're into heavily-cinematic games, Playstation is your no-brainer choice, they've got you covered in all sorts of genres. And they've got the Spiderman games.
Nintendo, meanwhile practically owns the kart racing genre. There is literally no other AAA effort that isn't cash in crap or loaded up with so much MTX crap that even Fortnite would blush.
Mario Oddesey might have a bit more competition nowadays but in 2017, your only options were Oddesey, a (very good) indie game, and a neutered reboot of Ratchet and Clank.
Breath of the Wild came at a time when most open world games were very rigid when it came to how players dealt with tasks and enemies. BoTW gave players a lot more options thank simply going in quiet or loud, and ToTK took it much further. They practically changed how other companies look at open world games.
Nintendo puts AAA efforts into entire game genres that most other companies ignore entirely, even if the audiences do not. This is how they've maintained crazy Switch sales.
Sony's games are on PC now. Final Fantasy restricted itself to PS5 and underperformed. Games that those platforms use to sell their platforms also come out on PC because they just cost too much to make, and there are too few of them because of how long they take to make now. Nintendo generally spends less, but they're still running into the same problem with development time, and that means their exclusive offerings will dwindle as they have to ramp up fidelity on more powerful hardware, just like what happened with Sony and Microsoft, which means fewer and fewer games that can only be played on that specific set of hardware. Third party exclusives mostly disappeared because, for the same reasons, restricting yourself to one platform is generally a stupid idea these days.
As an aside, racing games in general are rare these days, not just kart racers. My options are Mario Kart, sim racers, one step down from a sim racer like Forza Horizon, and little else. I like racing games, but not any of those. The market will come back around; I've got Trail Out right now and Aero GPX in the near future that will hopefully tide me over until someone makes racing games for me again.
Years after their playstation debut. Because they know that people who want to play AAA games on a PC do so for reasons the PlayStation platform just doesn't cater to, thus they aren't exactly competing. That and porting costs are reasonably minimal, so it's money on the table.
Games that those platforms use to sell their platforms also come out on PC because they just cost too much to make, and there are too few of them because of how long they take to make now.
Do you really think the PC market is that big that it'll plug a shortfall like that?
Xbox initially only did it because both platforms were controlled and toll-collected by Microsoft (I'm talking specifically about Windows Store, they only put their stuff on Steam much later).
Final Fantasy restricted itself to PS5 and underperformed.
Nintendo generally spends less, but they're still running into the same problem with development time, and that means their exclusive offerings will dwindle as they have to ramp up fidelity on more powerful hardware.
The switch has about 98 first party games, and isn't exactly slowing down. That's not counting third party exclusives, either.
Nintendo generally gets around this by having certain third parties develop its first party games. It also acquires some of these studios to develop these titles. Smash was a Bandai Namco game. Mario + Rabbids is a Ubisoft game. Hyrule and Fire Emblem warriors were made by Team Ninja and Omega Force.
Nintendo also has one more reason not to port: there is much less customer mutual exclusivity between switch and other platforms as there is between Xbox, PS and gaming PC. That is, a person who has one of the three is unlikely to have one of the other two, but may have a Switch for portable gaming.
Hmmm. I did some research on a few games and you are surprisingly correct. However, I did notice something else too.
Nintendo doesn't need extra sales numbers from PC. Their games sell record breaking amounts while being exclusive. Of the top 50 best selling games of all time, 7 are Nintendo games that are either Switch exclusives or WiiU ports, where they did much better on the Switch. Sony, in total, has 1, and Microsoft, in total, also has 1 (2 if you count Minecraft, as they bought Mojang during the latter's heyday). Half of that list is Nintendo.
That's true, but again, I think they're going to run into more resistance with development time as they upgrade their hardware and the art assets have to rise to meet the new spec and the new audience expectation. Those Wii U ports had the benefit of being ports, which is a situation that will never happen again. Since basically no one played the Wii U, it was more like a machine gun fire of games for the Switch that already had the hardest part done. Also, unlike any time in history except for the lifespan of the PSP, there are real alternative options for handheld gaming now as we head into this new Switch successor, which probably doesn't affect anyone buying the machine for Pokemon in hell or high water, but it will have an impact on the buyer who just wants to play Hades or Doom in bed or on a road trip and now has that many fewer reasons to buy Nintendo's console over a more open platform.
Those Wii U ports had the benefit of being ports, which is a situation that will never happen again.
True, but they still had to develop these games initially for WiiU, only for them to bomb there. And the WiiU was an eighth gen console.
Since basically no one played the Wii U, it was more like a machine gun fire of games for the Switch that already had the hardest part done.
If the rumours of backwards compatibility are to be believed, the Switch 2 could just straight up sell Switch games with Switch 2 enhancement patches. Something very similar was shown to developers with BoTW running at 60fps at 4k on Switch 2, and such a patch is known to exist for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.
It won't have the same newness factor of the WiiU ports, but it will allow Nintendo's evergreen titles to keep that status until the Switch 2 iteration.
Also, unlike any time in history except for the lifespan of the PSP, there are real alternative options for handheld gaming now as we head into this new Switch successor,
You mean the Steam Deck and clones? I don't mean to burst your bubble, but the least janky of these units has you scouring ProtonDB to check a games compatibility with the unit, and community notes on what to enter into the advanced run commands section or on rare occasions, even what Linux commands to run.
And that's the least janky option. The Steam Deck clones are worse, as at least the SD had the good grace to use an operating system designed for that specific hardware and form factor. Yeah. Switch 2 is pretty safe.
but it will have an impact on the buyer who just wants to play Hades or Doom in bed or on a road trip and now has that many fewer reasons to buy Nintendo's console over a more open platform.
You honestly think they're going to put up with any kind of SD/clone jank?
It won't have the same newness factor of the WiiU ports
This is exactly my point though. Backwards compatibility is an expectation now, but if you didn't have a Wii U, like most people didn't, it makes the Switch feel like it's got twice as many original games as it actually had, and they won't be able to repeat that.
You mean the Steam Deck and clones? I don't mean to burst your bubble, but the least janky of these units has you scouring ProtonDB to check a games compatibility with the unit, and community notes on what to enter into the advanced run commands section or on rare occasions, even what Linux commands to run.
I've sat just about the most technically unsavvy people I know in front of a Steam Deck and told them to stick to verified games, and it's been as smooth sailing as a Switch is; which is to say that neither is perfect, and the way they're imperfect is a little different between them. But again, PCs have been steadily growing in gaming market share for over a decade. PCs got easier, consoles became more complicated, and maybe some percentage of the market was also willing to learn what they needed to to further close that gap just like how all of our parents eventually learned how to use the internet and cell phones. I'm certainly not capable of measuring the effect of each of those things on that trend, but this is the way we're trending.
The Switch 2 is certainly safe. In particular, the Switch is a device made for children, which helps it reach a demographic that the Steam Deck isn't targeting and may never target. I'm not so sure the next Switch is going to do as well as this one has though. And in each subsequent generation, I think they'll head in the same direction as Microsoft and Sony or do something absolutely insane instead of responding to what the market is actually asking for.
I've sat just about the most technically unsavvy people I know in front of a Steam Deck and told them to stick to verified games,
That's the problem. You have to tell people to stick to a currently small selection of possible games on the system to ensure a console-like experience. Or, you can just pick up a Switch 2 and not have to worry about any of that shit.
I'm a Linux gamer, so I know how powerful and impressive Proton is. But a console like experience, it is not. Many of my Steam games need advanced commands just to run acceptably.
Steam Decks hit their real potential in the hands of someone who is not afraid to fuck around.
Verified games are not a small selection anymore. They're not the entire breadth of Steam, but there are about as many verified games as there are Switch games. Double that if you're including the certified playable games. No Switch tax, no compromised version of the game, no subscription to play online. I get a lot more value out of mine than I do a Switch, and the most I've fucked around on it is installing EmuDeck.
All that applies to Nintendo titles, especially the latter. If they don't manage it for the titles they already have for which they already did the technical work, Nintendo on PC seems even more unlikely.
True, but Nintendo's consoles already had working FOSS emulators out there they can study. We're still working on the 'working' part when it comes to Xbox OG emulation
The general emulation community is still working on it.
Like I was saying, if they can run retrocompatible games on Xbox Series X, a x86 Windows-like system, then internally Microsoft does have some sort of solution for running OG Xbox and 360 already working.
So it's not a technical issue, public Nintendo emulators don't really change that. Meaning that it's not any more likely that they would offer Nintendo games on PC if they owned them.
It's extremely more likely that they'd put up emulated Nintendo games. We have something bordering on perfect emulation for several of Nintendo's old systems, and we don't have that for Xbox. They can literally just slot in an emulator that someone else coded rather than having to patch in custom emulation code on a per-game basis like they currently do for backwards compatible Xbox games. Again, the point is moot. Microsoft will not own Nintendo, but if anyone else took over Nintendo for any reason, it's much easier to sell fully functioning retro Nintendo games on PC than it is to do the same on PC for old Xbox games.
I'm getting a bit tired of repeating myself. You are responding to a comment that is directed to that particular point.
Microsoft has already figured out how to run older XBox games on PC. As far as the technology goes, XBox One and Series S/X are not compatible with the previous XBoxes, they are PCs in every aspect but branding and closedness. All those games they offer retrocompatibility could be made available on PC. They could put Rare Replay on PC anytime they want. They don't do it because they don't care to do it.
It does not matter that Nintendo emulators are perfect.
They have a working Original Xbox emulator.
They have a working XBox 360 emulator.
They have titles that are entirely owned by them to release, and they only do that on console.
Releasing Nintendo games would be "extremely more likely"? Given that whatever obstacle here is not technical, then the existence of publicly released Nintendo emulators don't change the matter one bit. Meanwhile the licensing complexities only add further obstacles.
You keep making it an axiom of your argument that they just have an emulator ready to go to port all the same games even though the best information we have is that their emulator requires specific tweaks for each game to even get them running on a single hardware target. So you're repeating yourself on an assumption that I don't think is fair to make. That plus their MO is more along the lines of putting out a remaster of Fable or the Master Chief collection on PC for the very few true console exclusives on Xbox. We can agree to disagree and call it here.
It's not uncommon in general emulation to need tweaks for different games, and they already figured those out. If they can get their old games running on Xbox One, One X, Series S and Series X it means they can consistently keep them working across multiple different configurations. At this point, they are perfectly capable of handling a full PC release of these titles if they wanted to. You are getting too caught up in particularities that just don't change the conclusion.
It's not like they'd release a standalone all-purpose emulator. More likely they'd bundle the games with setups that are already tweaked for those particular games. Just as they would need to for Nintendo games. Even Nintendo itself had to do that. The initially flawed Ocarina of Time Switch Online release comes to mind.
It still makes more sense to assume that if Microsoft is not interested in doing it for their own games, there is no reason to assume they would do it for any others.
You really think M$ is better about this? You still can’t play any Forza Motorsport games on back compat, there may be some technical reason for this, but I doubt it. They delist games before the next one in the series comes out too, which is the wildest shit. you can’t buy FM7 anymore and haven’t been able to for a while. The new one isn’t even out yet.
This practice boggles the mind because I can go on Steam and most publishers are still selling their decade + old games.
That one's on car manufacturers. Anyone that licenses real cars deals with the same nonsense. Those games in particular are not built to be sold forever, perhaps because car manufacturers only want you to think about the new models. It's also probably a factor in why the upcoming Forza is built as a "live service" that will keep getting updated, though I suspect that means old cars get removed in favor of their new models somehow.
You mean we won’t have to buy ewaste electronics to play Mario Kart? Sign me up.
Realistically though, I’d bet on a “Mario Kart Mushroom Kingdom Racing” release (or something) that would just be a cross platform live service.
… and honestly I’ll take that any day over Nintendo, which I’ve given $0 in over a decade because I refuse to buy their ewaste. I would love to have their games on PC though.
@Dark_Arc weirdly all my old consoles and games work. I've definitely made more e-waste from PC and upgrades over the years than consoles. (let's not talk about phones...)
PC parts can be reused and resold until they’re irrelevant. Decades old PC software can run on the latest hardware (often much better than it did on its original hardware).
Meanwhile, consoles do one job only, play games. If something breaks, more often than not you get an entirely new console; maybe the manufacturer actually fixes your old one (if they’re still working on it).
They also lose security updates and become opportunities for botnets to infect and exploit. No device should be used past its end of software life that’s connected to the Internet. Regardless of that, many people do continue to use old consoles and smart phones that are long past their socially responsible expiration date.
Beyond that, if someone has a computer capable of playing a game, to force them to buy a different piece of hardware is by definition unnecessary ewaste.
Decades old PC software can run on the latest hardware (often much better than it did on its original hardware).
This is increasingly less true as the software dependencies get more complicated. See also, Rockstar selling pirated games because that was the way to get it running…
Window’s compatibility layer is still far beyond what a console provides. Beyond that, WINE (for Linux) is increasingly able to run Windows programs from many decades… In a sense, Linux is becoming the best Windows compatibility layer for old software and games in the world.
You don’t need to reach 100% to provide value/be better.
I know these Chucklehead Executive Officers only exist to enrich the companies they run and by extension, themselves, but they all seem to fail to understand that running a company is not just merge and acquire. Of course that is what capitalism wants, but there is room for there to be more than five Big Names in Gaming, and a MSFT-owned Nintendo would not be what it is today. You don’t become an innovator by buying the innovative companies.
Yes, Nintendo’s hardware has gradually fallen “behind the times” (if you look at raw power, generationally) but guess what? A majority of people are still willing to play Mario, Zelda, and many more quality first-party titles on potatoes as long as the games are fun.
Nintendo has taken risks and made some weird crap over the years, but that is exactly what makes them different from the other two. I don’t think we would have had Nintendo Switch today without the wild consumer success of the Wii and then the massive pendulum swing of the WiiU (which was tethered to the home just like that new PS5 Portal display controller). They came to market with an R&D Wii 1.5 prototype that flopped, but that sent them right back to the drawing board to rethink it, creating the Switch, which effectively merged their console and handheld divisions.
I am not a betting person, but if I was, I would be placing my chips on the card company-turned beloved video game creator that turns 134 this week, and not the American conglomerate that thinks the entire future of gaming is subscriptions and microtransactions on the third place console.
Nintendo does have a lot of issues, but they’re clearly a company that still puts a lot of love into their games and products. I hope they keep on making great games, and maybe they’ll even make better hardware some day. Even if they don’t, not every system has to offer the latest and greatest to be fun and successful. Nintendo proved that time and time again.
How would they plan to do that? Foreign investment in Japanese companies is heavily regulated, much more than it is regulated in the Americas or Europe.
The ActiBlizz merger needs to be shot down and Microsoft Games needs to be forced to split off from Microsoft. This tactic of “Make all the money in one sector, then use that unlimited money to invade another sector, force small businesses out by operating at a loss, and then enshittifying the entire sector to a state worse than it was originally” has to stop - across all sectors.
If you can’t survive in your own sector on your own merits without money from Daddy Corpo, you deserve to die.
I also hate that Spencer talks like “sitting on a big pile of cash” instead of gambling it on the market is fucking stupid. Classic “NOW NOW NOW” American capitalism.
I get called a Sony fanboy for calling out Microsoft for being terrible for gaming. I haven’t owned a Nintendo device since N64, but I have nothing bad to say about them. They make great games.
It’s weird calling for one mega corp to be split up while supporting another mega corp that owns more than the first. Everyone needs a reality check if they think any mega corp doesn’t want the same thing.
In the context of gaming, Sony and Microsoft couldn’t be more different. I can get over Sony’s terrible store backend or refund policies. I know how they work, how to avoid pitfalls, etc. at the end of the day, they make the better games that I like to play and have shown over the course of thirty years to support gaming first.
Sony and Nintendo are both terrible, hypocritical companies in their own right. That by no means absolves Microsoft of being who they are, and the pro-consumer tactic Xbox has employed for the past 5 or 6 years is definitely a calculated move and the result of them falling hard after the Don Mattrick era, but to say that Microsoft (and by that I assume you mean Xbox) is terrible for gaming is a bad take. The gaming landscape is better because Xbox exists. Competition and choice empower the consumer. If you think Sony wouldn’t be an even shittier company without the competition Xbox provides, you really don’t understand how these avaricious corporate conglomerates operate.
Funny thing being that the only reason SONY is in gaming was to screw Nintendo. They had a hardware partnership that fell apart because SONY was putting the thumbscrews to Nintendo over revenue sharing. Nintendo said, you’re not the only one who can provide what we need, and dumped them. PlayStation was the direct result.
That’s a incredibly biased way of saying a business deal feel through, Nintendo went to a competitor, and Sony decided to prove Nintendo made the wrong choice and stay in the market
This humiliating turnabout enraged Sony president Norio Ohga, but though it seemed sudden from the outside, problems had been boiling between the two companies for some time. The main issue was an agreement over how revenue would be collected – Sony had proposed to take care of money made from CD sales while Nintendo would collect from cartridge sales, and suggested that royalties would be figured out later. “Nintendo went bananas, frankly, and said that we were stepping on its toll booth and that it was totally unacceptable,” explains Chris Deering, who at the time worked at Sony-owned Columbia Pictures but would go on to head the PlayStation business in Europe. “They just couldn’t agree and it all fell apart.” - web.archive.org/web/…/making-playstation/
Nintendo broke their contract with Sony. I think it’s obvious that they messed that one up. What could have been right? Competition is good.
No no… it’s the part that Sony owns a headphone company, and a TV company, and their first product was a rice cooker.
The point was that they enter a space using funds from one of their other arms to strongarm away competition and become a conglomerate that owns and operates a huge percentage of people’s lives and product purchases leaving almost no breathing room for other companies to ever enter.
It’s not about refund policy or their games it’s about the subsidized products they can only afford by min/maxing other economic spaces they control
Nintendo was founded in the 1800s as a playing card company. To some extend every manufacturer started with something else. You’re misrepresenting my point. Sony entered the market and competed based on actual merit. They have grown their own in-house talent, in-house IPs, and technology just like Nintendo. Microsoft almost threw in the towel in 2013. There recent moves scream Embrace, Extend, Extinguish where they don’t have to worry about pesky things like making good games, but can force gamers to pay them monthly for whatever they feel like putting out, or just let third parties do the work and use their power to force them into whatever pricing Microsoft wants. People thinking GamePass is great should brush up on their history of what Microsoft does when they get the upper hand. I say this as a someone who uses a ton of Microsoft Products outside of gaming.
I also hate that Spencer talks like “sitting on a big pile of cash” instead of gambling it on the market is fucking stupid.
If you're sitting on cash, you're guaranteed to lose money to inflation. If you invest it wisely, you have a good chance of beating inflation. Even in personal finance, it's very stupid to sit on a big pile of cash; everything above and beyond an emergency fund or savings for a short-term goal should be invested.
I’m assuming that “big pile of cash” is their emergency fund - Spencer implies as much when he says that it serves as an impediment to buying them out.
There's some use for an emergency fund, but since businesses this size have steady streams of revenue, they usually only want to sit on tons of cash when they can't find anything better to invest it in. Microsoft went on acquisition sprees, but other companies might buy back shares to return that excess cash to investors.
Honestly even the idea of an emergency fund, I mean accounting dorks say things like “save six months salary in an accessible, liquid form”.
Does anybody really do that? I mean for a middle-class well-educated dual-income household that’s probably close to 100k, which we were all recently reminded the limit for bank account insurance.
If you own your home doesn’t it make more sense to have a secured line of credit set for emergencies and then ride as close to the wire as you feel comfortable?
Your emergency fund is usually recommended to be 3-6 months of expenses, not salary...though I guess for plenty of people, even at high salaries, that may be the same number, but then you'll never have savings anyway. Really your emergency fund is for however much risk you can tolerate, like if you end up unemployed for 3-6 months, but your emergency fund is for things other than just unemployment, like sudden medical expenses or replacing a water heater. If you're comfortable with a line of credit on your home being your emergency fund, go for it. There's some risk to that, but there's different kinds of risk to everything.
Yes, because otherwise how the fuck can I afford to move apartments when my landlord raises the price by a thousand dollars a month. But also I have no assets so it’s my entire savings and I can’t put it anywhere because I need it within a year.
So yeah some of us are fucked and the idea that a middle class household would make 100k in 6 months means you have no touch on reality for real wages for lots of people.
Sorry, forgot this was an international community. $100k CAD. So $75k USD. We’ve the same 100k bank-insurance limit here, but its $100k CAD.
Either way, I know plenty of people who make near $200k of household income and are still fucked because they didn’t get into the housing market in time before the door slammed shut (average home in Greater Toronto is now well north of a $million, even with our stupid-expensive interest rates). Like, teachers and realtors make $90k CAD after a few years of experience these days, but that doesn’t accomplish much when rent keeps jumping and nobody can afford to buy. Basically the only reason everybody isn’t eating cat-food is they’re either in a pre-rent-deregulation unit or they bought before it all hit the fan.
Also, side-note: the traditional concept of “middle class” is not the modern expansive definition of “basically everybody who doesn’t own either a private jet or live in a cardboard box”. That is, somebody who pays rent and has a job that doesn’t require grad-school used to be considered “working class”. It’s just that for some dumb reason we all collectively decided that “working class” was something to be embarrassed about.
Microsoft Games needs to be forced to split off from Microsoft.
That would mean Minecraft could actually be released for more than Android and Windows again. That game was on every platform then Bedrock came out and it’s on 2. They even said Mac and Linux versions were coming after release and it’s been years. A C++ version of the game is ideal. It runs faster, it plays better, they also integrated a marketplace and overall I like bedrock but they only did it to keep a monopoly on gaming.
That said, Game Pass is uniquely tied to Windows at this point and has very little ability to have the same protections on Mac or Linux. Windows is the only OS that can hard lock you away from your files. For better or worse. Game Pass is a neat system but also has major downfalls.
This is both interesting and terrifying at the same time. I’m not much of a Nintendo fan these days, but I don’t think Microsoft would really help things if they acquired them. But I also doubt Nintendo would sell… Can they be taken over hostilely (acquire them through buying a controlling number of shares)? I am not sure how that shit works if the companies are in totally different countries, even if both are publicly traded.
Microsoft were monopoly seeking/abusing pricks in the 80s/90s/00s but I had just about started to accept that maybe they had changed. Accepting open source and open standards, and competing on their merits in the gaming world.
I was wrong. They’re not as powerful as they were 20 years ago but, having seen this email, their tactics seem unchanged.
Very telling that he wanted to do it because it seemed like a good career move personally first, as opposed to something that would somehow be a good match.
Let me preface this by saying I would not be in favor of this acquisition, even though Nintendo are a bunch of overly litigious pricks that abuse the copyright system in the name of profits and treat their partners with open hostility and their eShop is a shovelware shitfest running on hardware that was already antique by the time it launched. But I really don’t see how this is anything more than Phil Spencer being a bit too transparent. Jim Ryan and Sony would jump at the chance to acquire Nintendo just as eagerly. Both PS and Xbox have been aggressively pursuing acquisitions and consolidation for years now, and Nintendo would be a crown jewel in any gaming publisher’s portfolio.
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