If Mickey Mouse copyright law wasn’t so draconian, we wouldn’t have these problems. Works should be protected about ten years and become public domain after that.
Seems to be the Year of Nintendo Burning Bridges. Upside is, maybe all the competition they’re finally getting in both the handheld space and in some of their big software franchises will force them to try to produce better content and hardware. Or it’ll be Nintendo and they’ll stay greedy in their walled garden with inferior products; at the very least we’ll have some superior alternatives to enjoy elsewhere!
Not at all! But seeing numbers like Palworld sales drove gives me hope GameFreak could panic a little and start trying (although as I mentioned Nintendo and their subsidiaries are greedy and merch sales are still strong for them, along with subpar game sales for the fanbase currently). Perhaps other subsidiaries of Nintendo. Certainly making more of an impact in attracting players than Digimon did when I was a kid, and that’s more of a change than I’ve seen in the last 20 or so years for Nintendo’s monster trainer.
In recent years Nintendo has had a little blue ocean to swim in, and they’ve shown that rather than compete or innovate as times change, they instead like to wall their garden off more. But hey, maybe Zelda and Pokemon can have an awesome next gen if they invest in a more powerful console (handheld or not) and spend a few years reworking their formula and passionately building an innovative game, like they used to do when I was a kid.
Once upon a time the Gameboy was a fairly powerful handheld system, and Pokémon Red was a groundbreaking game. But those days are gone, and the entire umbrella company as a whole needs to begin to try or they will continue to fall behind. Nostalgia only lasts as long as the affected generation(s). I’m hopeful something like the shocks of this year could change their mindset a little and get them to modernize a bit.
The Nintendo switch is one of the single most popular consoles of all time and no amount of abuse has driven their fans away so I don’t think this will be the final straw. The only thing that will hurt their next console is if they drop the ball as hard as they did like with Wii-U, which is very unlikely as they are basically signaling they’re just doing a switch v2. Xbox is absolutely shitting the bed right now and sony is figuring out their future given the insane budgets for AAA’s that they have greenlit in the past are clearly no longer sustainable and their live service play has not panned out. The nearest competitor is the steam deck, and I would be very surprised to learn that people are viewing that as in either/or proposition given the experiences and libraries are vastly different.
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