Tendo City
Nintendo Today - Printable Version

+- Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net)
+-- Forum: Tendo City: Metropolitan District (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=4)
+--- Forum: Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=42)
+--- Thread: Nintendo Today (/showthread.php?tid=7432)



Nintendo Today - A Black Falcon - 16th December 2022

What do you all think about Nintendo's direction in these post-Iwata years?

Yamauchi's Nintendo succeeded through a combination of focus on tech, developer relationships, and the best first party software in the industry.  Some elements of that foundered at times, but he had a great eye for talent and for understanding what people wanted, even if people didn't realize that that is what they wanted.  He apparently did not play videogames and was an imposing traditional Japanese boss, but it worked. This era of the company built up a strong and independent American branch, which was critical to Nintendo's continuing success when they totally collapsed in support in Japan with the N64 but did much better in the US market.  Yamauchii retired in the '00s, but apparently his last suggestion was the project that became the Nintendo DS, Nintendo's best-selling console.

After Yamauchi retired, Iwata became head of the company.  His era, from the Gamecube to the Wii U, saw some major changes.  Essentially, Iwata dropped the tech part of Yamauchi's three main pillars, relying instead on innovation to sell systems.  This sometimes worked and sometimes did not; Nintendo was both very successful during these years as the Wii and DS sold spectacularly, and struggled as the Gamecube and Wii U very much did not.  He centralized corporate control in Japan and took away almost all of Nintendo of America's independence.  He broke off relations with most of the close Western studios who had been supporting Nintendo, as well, only keeping a very few such as Retro and NST.  Nintendo lost most "AAA" software after about '02 because of the above reasons, but did eventually get slowly growing support from smaller developers which helped to make up for it. 

However, Iwata sadly died young, and now Nintendo has new leadership.  The new leadership has dialed back his focus on innovation, but has not brought back a focus on tech; instead, they seem more focused on focus-tested ideas that will sell, while also re-releasing a lot of Wii U games that didn't sell well the first time because of how sadly poorly that console sold.  Now, I don't want ot be too hard on modern Nintendo since the Switch has an absolutely amazing game library, with thousands and thousands of indie games available digitally and a top-tier first party library, but... I've always been a bit critical of the platform on a design front, and that has not changed.  The eshop is absolutely horrible with one of the most broken, slowest shops this side of the PS3; the system drops most of the Iwata era's interesting, good innovations such as pointer motion and a second screen; the portable nature of the machine has left it as both an oversized portable and an underpowered home console; and more.  Of course that it has one of my favorite games ever, Super Mario Maker 2, is a plus, though.  Mario Maker is a better game for creators on Wii U, showing that system's advantages over the Switch in terms of hardware design, but the many added parts in SMM2 make up for that for me.

But still, yeah,  I don't know, I have some major issues with Iwata, most notably with how he lost Nintendo's Western developers, but the new era is in a lot of ways worse.  Sure, the Switch is both a portable and a handheld, which is an interesting idea which kind of works, and its controller does have built in gyro motion, which is great, but... I'm not sure how much of this is just because we are getting older and how much is real, but it does feel like some of the innovation and genius of old Nintendo has been lost in favor of more sequels and such.  And the new leaders are not the kind of public-focused leaders Nintendo had before, they seem to me like more generic corporate board types. 

Now, of course Nintendo is still doing interesting things.  Labo was a pretty cool experiment, for instance.  It didn't entirely work out, both in sales and in function -- my opinion on Labo is that they are a lot of fun to build but not that great to play with and are hard to keep around with how huge the resulting models are -- but it was an interesting idea worth trying.  And making more sequels and the like isn't a bad thing, I like Splatoon 3 for instance; it's no Splatoon 1, but I definitely like it more than the second game and I'm glad the series continues.  But in a lot of ways it is an entirely iterative sequel which does not change the series formula at all.  And the Switch's insanely overwhelming volume of digital-only releases is something ... maybe in its favor, depending on ones opinion about how many of the games are actually worth playing.  But even so, I do think something has been lost.  How important what has been lost is I'm not sure, but  I probably do think that Nintendo is slightly less interesting as a company than they used to be.  Nintendo still releases amazing, innovative games and does more than enough to keep me buying their stuff as a fan, but the company as a whole is not what it used to be.  That is both good and bad -- obviously as a company they are doing fantastically well right now, the Switch is extremely successful -- but for me it's as much bad as good.  But things change over time, that's how it goes...

But what do you think?


RE: Nintendo Today - Dark Jaguar - 18th December 2022

The interesting thing is each of these "eras" can be just as easily defined by what's going on outside the company as what's going on within it.  The CEO may in fact be a reflection of what those who chose to put each one in charge felt was needed in the first place to keep Nintendo competitive.  For example, the Gamecube feels more like a part of the earlier era than the later era, with it's focus on power and creative off the wall game designs.  In fact the Gamecube was the last system to directly compete with Sony (and fledgling Microsoft) on their own terms.  But, that system failed.  Was the Gamecube the result of Iwata's leadership and a place where Iwata decided to change Nintendo's direction, or was it already set in stone being in development since before Iwata's takeover and was carried on by project inertia?

In the 80's and 90's we had a long era where smaller companies were all jumping into the console ring.  Just about everyone tried it, and while some were utter failures, it was a lot easier to find a niche.  Do "micro-PCs" count as consoles?  By the standards of the time, heck, modern consoles are pretty much ALL "micro-PCs", especially the ones that have some kind of cute "coding" app you can download.  In any case, it didn't take too much to join that arena and STILL produce a console that, for at least a couple years, did things a PC couldn't.  3D acceleration changed that.  Moore's law was one thing but console makers quickly found out JUST how much of a jump in horse power was needed to make 3D actually look good.  Check out our opinions on N64 games at the time of their release.  We were simultaneously impressed by the likes of Perfect Dark while acknowledging just how far from "realistic" any of that actually looked and we all were hyped for the next gen that might actually make stuff that "looked like Toy Story".  We knew much better was possible, and the Dolphin excited us a lot.

We got a whole generation stuffed full of cooling fans and every last system was surprisingly large.  The Gamecube hid it's size well by going vertical.  Nintendo acknowledged that, at least for a time, cartridges weren't going to cut it.  (Ironically, they've gone right back to carts these days.)  The next jump, each console maker realized, was going to need to be pretty huge to be noticeable by the customers.  Without that, the "HD revolution" wasn't going to work.  Both MS and Sony slipped into a mode where their consoles were sold at a loss.  Nintendo meanwhile looked at how the Gamecube and all it's fun bizarre games actually sold compared to the PS2, and it came up lacking.  That is the key point.  Nintendo refused to sell at a loss, and so they decided to stop competing on power altogether.  The Gamecube was "good enough", so just up the clock speed a touch and double the RAM, then focus R&D entirely on the interface.  They were selling their most popular console of all time and they were selling at a profit!  PS3 and XBox 360 however, the "core gamers" fled to those for the big name games.  It took a few years compared to the last gen but eventually games really started showing what they could do on that gen compared to last, but this would be the last time there was a start instantly visible difference between the last gen and the current one.

Iwata saw the power competition between Sony and MS and simply opted out of it entirely.  In the long run, that was the best move to make.  Consoles were getting ridiculously expensive to make, and that trend hasn't ceased since.  Alright, so Nintendo was a single "generation" behind, but they still knew how to make the hardware work for them.  This kept up for a bit, until the Wii U came along.  Iwata's style found it's major weakness.  If the gimmick they come up with isn't seen as valuable, no one is going to buy it, and no one really wanted "the Wii but with a tablet".  What didn't help is that most people didn't even realize the Wii U was a hardware upgrade.  Nintendo didn't really push that the Wii U was at last competitive with the PS3 and XBox 360 (just before the PS4 and XBox One were to launch, but still).  Nintendo was also starting to develop a reputation, deserved or not, for just constantly iterating on existing franchises and not being nearly as daring as they were with the Gamecube and earlier.  That has only become more true with time, though it's worth noting the numerous ignored franchises introduced on the 3DS like Pushmo, Dillon, and Boxboy.

In any case, this is when we enter the as you put it, "focus tested" era.  Focus testing is not all bad.  It really is important to get an idea on whether or not the public actually wants what you're selling.  Now, my opinion on the Switch is that this was ultimately a very wise move.  The Switch is everything the Wii U tried to be, but in it's ultimate form after all.  It was that final realization of just what the Wii U was trying to be, while finally ditching the one thing it can't do, the duel screen thing.  That was a major design mistake since people can't look at both screens at once, and if you can't do that, what's the point of having two?  May as well have a button to switch back and forth between two views on a single screen.  The fact that just about every popular Wii U game was easily ported to Switch with minimal changes pretty much goes to show how much of a pointless gimmick that was.  Well, never mind about that.  I'm starting to rant about specific game design and not their leadership decisions. 

Alright, point is, their new leadership is going all-in on indy games in a way we haven't seen in a long time.  However, there's accepting indy titles, and there's making the same problem Atari had before the U.S. game market collapsed.  They opened the flood gates.  Instead of taking the careful approach of vetting and approving indy titles after review, they're letting everything on.  The Switch store has turned from a bastion of good indy talent to a shovelware platform, and "discoverability" suffers as badly as it does on Steam, or the PS4/5.  Modern Nintendo is focused even further on never straying too far from established franchises, or even the IMAGE of their franchises.  They currently have set in stone rules about "spinoff" Mario games not being allowed to create new species and locations and being stuck with what already exists within the Mario franchise.  This environment makes Paper Mario suffer!  They also seem to play it FAR safer with storylines.  Of course, Pokemon's constant repetition of those game's stories is infamous at this point, but Paper Mario in particular used to have rather engaging stories while now they're very safe and paint by numbers.  We don't get whole new locations full of cloud people or buzzy dreamland inhabitants, we get toads and toads and toads forever.

This isn't to say there's NO innovation, but "play it safe" Nintendo really does make one worry in some ways... except for one thing.  The one place we want them to play it safe is their own legacy, and not alienating their core audience.  Nintendo resisted the lure of microtransactions and loot boxes before, but it's very clear their investors have put way too much pressure to dive in and we're seeing that creep in all over the place.  From the Amiibo becoming nothing more than glorified physical DLC unlock keys to working in microtransaction manipulation and even loot boxes into their mobile phone offerings, it's a scary time.  This, if you ask me, above all else is the thing that frightens me most about Nintendo as a company.  They're sinking into this customer abusing practice deeper and deeper.  In fact, while such things USED to be mobile only, now those same manipulative games are ending up on Switch.  It's a worrying time and Nintendo is very close to just embracing this fully.  MS of course are the worst of the big three when it comes to this.  It's so bad that MS's core franchise, Halo, was reduced to a lootbox factory as of Halo 5 and turned into a full on FOMO "time limited unlock event" design with Infinite.

Time will tell if Nintendo manages to pull themselves back out, but this whole thing if you ask me isn't a sign of just "leadership style changes".  I think it's the other way around.  The leaders were picked after all.  They didn't conquer and rise.  The leaders reflect the concerns the higher ups at Nintendo had.  That's the neoliberal problem in a nutshell.  They think the system's fine the way it is, it's just that we need the right leader, and abuses of the system aren't a failing of that system, just a failing of the wrong person put in charge.  To me, the very fact a bad leader CAN exert that much control IS the problem.  Counting on luck to deliver the right leader every time has failed us.  The system has failed us.  Capitalism has failed us.  Nintendo's steady crawl towards abusing it's customers isn't just the result of having Scrimgeour in charge here.  The whole danged ministry needs to be torn down.  They are being financially motivated to make every single decision they have made.  Once, it made sense when Nintendo was much smaller to woo customers and bend over backwards to give those customers everything they wanted and build that solid loyalty to their brand.  That no longer makes financial sense, so they no longer feel bound by that.  That ultimately is the explanation behind EVERY one of Nintendo's decisions, good or bad.  The president currently in charge is largely inconsequential in the face of that.


RE: Nintendo Today - A Black Falcon - 4th January 2023

(18th December 2022, 9:14 AM)Dark Jaguar Wrote: The interesting thing is each of these "eras" can be just as easily defined by what's going on outside the company as what's going on within it.  The CEO may in fact be a reflection of what those who chose to put each one in charge felt was needed in the first place to keep Nintendo competitive.  For example, the Gamecube feels more like a part of the earlier era than the later era, with it's focus on power and creative off the wall game designs.  In fact the Gamecube was the last system to directly compete with Sony (and fledgling Microsoft) on their own terms.  But, that system failed.  Was the Gamecube the result of Iwata's leadership and a place where Iwata decided to change Nintendo's direction, or was it already set in stone being in development since before Iwata's takeover and was carried on by project inertia?

This is a good question, but there are probably two parts to the answer.  First, Iwata took over Nintendo in May 2002, after the Gamecube had already been released.  Of course he was high up in the company before that, but the system was already set.  And the other part is that the rest of his strategy was a reaction to the Gamecube's failure.  With the GC Nintendo tried to have great tech and to match Sony, but it didn't work.  So Iwata changed strategies after that and went with a new idea, lower-tier tech but way more innovation.  And it worked extremely well for a while, before faltering with the Wii U thanks to some strategic mistakes.

Quote:In the 80's and 90's we had a long era where smaller companies were all jumping into the console ring.  Just about everyone tried it, and while some were utter failures, it was a lot easier to find a niche.  Do "micro-PCs" count as consoles?  By the standards of the time, heck, modern consoles are pretty much ALL "micro-PCs", especially the ones that have some kind of cute "coding" app you can download.  In any case, it didn't take too much to join that arena and STILL produce a console that, for at least a couple years, did things a PC couldn't.  3D acceleration changed that.  Moore's law was one thing but console makers quickly found out JUST how much of a jump in horse power was needed to make 3D actually look good.  Check out our opinions on N64 games at the time of their release.  We were simultaneously impressed by the likes of Perfect Dark while acknowledging just how far from "realistic" any of that actually looked and we all were hyped for the next gen that might actually make stuff that "looked like Toy Story".  We knew much better was possible, and the Dolphin excited us a lot.
Yeah, the '90s were such an exciting time for gaming, a time when tech was improving so quickly and every year things changed dramatically.  The '80s were similar.  But this millennium that gradually ended in favor of fewer platforms, an extremely high financial barrier for entry into the market that makes new entries almost impossible, and better tech that is way more powerful, powerful enough that the difference between good and bad matters far less than it used to.  Oh, of course tech still matters -- some Switch games have pretty poor framerates, Switch graphics are easy enough to tell apart from Xbox Series X graphics on my 4K TV, etc -- but when you compare now to the '90s the difference is dramatic.  We hit a graphics par that did not exist yet then, graphics are relatively easy to make "good enough".  Of course, the problem is that high end visuals now are more expensive than ever and keep going up and up and up in cost to an unaffordable degree.  Games are insanely expensive to make now and it's driven a lot of companies out of the market, both on the hardware and software sides.  We've all talked about the hollowing out of the middle tier of games before, but even the upper tier is getting emptier, as companies focus on fewer and fewer tentpole titles with insanely high budgets and massive numbers of required sales to break even.  So far it's working, barely, because of how popular gaming is now, but how sustainable the AAA market is is an open question.

All this just makes the '80s and '90s look even better, of course, since the smaller budgets back then allowed for so much more variety of releases from major publishers.  Nintendo has somewhat avoided the AAA trap by making games at lower budgets for their still-weaker hardware, and it's working reasonably well because of how much slower tech is advancing now on the consumer level, but will it continue to?  The Switch is old now, after all.  I hope the next generation transition, whenever it comes, works well for them but you never know.  And while advancements in graphics tech are slower than they used to be and prices are higher, things are not yet at the level where you don't need improvements at all, so a replacement for the Switch is necessary eventually.  I'm not one of those super focused on wanting Nintendo to replace the Switch, since most of the games I play on Switch run just fine on the system and while it'd be nice if it had 4K output and visuals like the Xbox Series X does, given the level of graphics any platform can make today, the Switch is mostly fine I think.  But I know plenty of people out there are more frustrated with its graphics than I am, probably because theyre playing more of the games that run poorly than I do.

Quote:We got a whole generation stuffed full of cooling fans and every last system was surprisingly large.  The Gamecube hid it's size well by going vertical.  Nintendo acknowledged that, at least for a time, cartridges weren't going to cut it.  (Ironically, they've gone right back to carts these days.)  The next jump, each console maker realized, was going to need to be pretty huge to be noticeable by the customers.  Without that, the "HD revolution" wasn't going to work.  Both MS and Sony slipped into a mode where their consoles were sold at a loss.  Nintendo meanwhile looked at how the Gamecube and all it's fun bizarre games actually sold compared to the PS2, and it came up lacking.  That is the key point.  Nintendo refused to sell at a loss, and so they decided to stop competing on power altogether.  The Gamecube was "good enough", so just up the clock speed a touch and double the RAM, then focus R&D entirely on the interface.  They were selling their most popular console of all time and they were selling at a profit!  PS3 and XBox 360 however, the "core gamers" fled to those for the big name games.  It took a few years compared to the last gen but eventually games really started showing what they could do on that gen compared to last, but this would be the last time there was a start instantly visible difference between the last gen and the current one.

Iwata saw the power competition between Sony and MS and simply opted out of it entirely.  In the long run, that was the best move to make.  Consoles were getting ridiculously expensive to make, and that trend hasn't ceased since.  Alright, so Nintendo was a single "generation" behind, but they still knew how to make the hardware work for them.  This kept up for a bit, until the Wii U came along.  Iwata's style found it's major weakness.  If the gimmick they come up with isn't seen as valuable, no one is going to buy it, and no one really wanted "the Wii but with a tablet".  What didn't help is that most people didn't even realize the Wii U was a hardware upgrade.  Nintendo didn't really push that the Wii U was at last competitive with the PS3 and XBox 360 (just before the PS4 and XBox One were to launch, but still).  Nintendo was also starting to develop a reputation, deserved or not, for just constantly iterating on existing franchises and not being nearly as daring as they were with the Gamecube and earlier.  That has only become more true with time, though it's worth noting the numerous ignored franchises introduced on the 3DS like Pushmo, Dillon, and Boxboy.
Yeah, it's really too bad that they messed up the Wii U, a lot of things about it are fantastic... but ultimately, while the confusion over whether it was anew console or an addon hurt it, the main flaw really probably was just that the tablet boom didn't take off like a lot of people expected it to.  Remember when tablets were going to replace laptops and such?  Yeah, that didn't happen.  People realized that tablets, while useful in certain instances, have major drawbacks.  In the Wii U's case, the large size of the controller is one of those drawbacks.  That only one player can have the tablet controller is another.   And as you say later, that you can't look at both the tablet and TV screen at the same time is a third.  And such.  I love the Wii U despite generally being lukewarm on tablets, because it also does gyro and pointer motion and there are some really good uses for the second screen and it does have physical controls unlike a tablet computer, but given how much tablets in general underwhelmed after the initial boom I do get why the Wii U struggled.

Also, you are right on the point that that era of Nintendo does have some iterative sequels in a way they hadn't been doing for a while, though, yeah.  Those games are of mixed quality, too -- Pushmo is pretty good and Boxboy great, but I don't like the Dillon games very much and NSMB and its sequels aren't nearly as great as they could have been... though the amazing genius of Mario Maker somewhat redeems that series.

Quote:In any case, this is when we enter the as you put it, "focus tested" era.  Focus testing is not all bad.  It really is important to get an idea on whether or not the public actually wants what you're selling.  Now, my opinion on the Switch is that this was ultimately a very wise move.  The Switch is everything the Wii U tried to be, but in it's ultimate form after all.  It was that final realization of just what the Wii U was trying to be, while finally ditching the one thing it can't do, the duel screen thing.  That was a major design mistake since people can't look at both screens at once, and if you can't do that, what's the point of having two?  May as well have a button to switch back and forth between two views on a single screen.  The fact that just about every popular Wii U game was easily ported to Switch with minimal changes pretty much goes to show how much of a pointless gimmick that was.  Well, never mind about that.  I'm starting to rant about specific game design and not their leadership decisions.
Sure, focus testing is not all bad, but it's a safer approach which leads to even less game diversity, fewer new ideas, and more obnoxious nonsense like what they have done to ruin the Paper Mario series with weird mechanics and five billion generic unaltered Toads.  The Switch is like the Wii U with most of its most interesting elements removed in favor of bland generic safeness.  It's usable but kind of boring.  And I use the Pro Controller like 99.9% of the time but wow are Joycons awful!  And even the Pro Controller's only okay, it's far below the Xbox Series controller in comfort.  I do love that it has gyro, not having it is Microsoft's one big fault and it is a big one, but for button games there is no comparison in feel between the two.  The Wii U controllers feel more comfortable, and the system is more feature-rich.  For hardware design, sorry, I still prefer the Wii U.  But that's just me.  Obviously most people disagreed, and whatever focus testing resulted in the Switch being made worked out well, that I don't unreservedly love it means nothing to them compared to the huge number of systems and games they have sold.

Quote:Alright, point is, their new leadership is going all-in on indy games in a way we haven't seen in a long time.  However, there's accepting indy titles, and there's making the same problem Atari had before the U.S. game market collapsed.  They opened the flood gates.  Instead of taking the careful approach of vetting and approving indy titles after review, they're letting everything on.  The Switch store has turned from a bastion of good indy talent to a shovelware platform, and "discoverability" suffers as badly as it does on Steam, or the PS4/5.  Modern Nintendo is focused even further on never straying too far from established franchises, or even the IMAGE of their franchises.  They currently have set in stone rules about "spinoff" Mario games not being allowed to create new species and locations and being stuck with what already exists within the Mario franchise.  This environment makes Paper Mario suffer!  They also seem to play it FAR safer with storylines.  Of course, Pokemon's constant repetition of those game's stories is infamous at this point, but Paper Mario in particular used to have rather engaging stories while now they're very safe and paint by numbers.  We don't get whole new locations full of cloud people or buzzy dreamland inhabitants, we get toads and toads and toads forever.
I certainly agree with these points.  Quantity is a thing worth mentioning, but I'll take quality over quantity every time.  And what they did to Paper Mario is indeed incredibly sad... the original N64 game is one of my favorite JRPGs ever!

Quote:This isn't to say there's NO innovation, but "play it safe" Nintendo really does make one worry in some ways... except for one thing.  The one place we want them to play it safe is their own legacy, and not alienating their core audience.  Nintendo resisted the lure of microtransactions and loot boxes before, but it's very clear their investors have put way too much pressure to dive in and we're seeing that creep in all over the place.  From the Amiibo becoming nothing more than glorified physical DLC unlock keys to working in microtransaction manipulation and even loot boxes into their mobile phone offerings, it's a scary time.  This, if you ask me, above all else is the thing that frightens me most about Nintendo as a company.  They're sinking into this customer abusing practice deeper and deeper.  In fact, while such things USED to be mobile only, now those same manipulative games are ending up on Switch.  It's a worrying time and Nintendo is very close to just embracing this fully.  MS of course are the worst of the big three when it comes to this.  It's so bad that MS's core franchise, Halo, was reduced to a lootbox factory as of Halo 5 and turned into a full on FOMO "time limited unlock event" design with Infinite.

Time will tell if Nintendo manages to pull themselves back out, but this whole thing if you ask me isn't a sign of just "leadership style changes".  I think it's the other way around.  The leaders were picked after all.  They didn't conquer and rise.  The leaders reflect the concerns the higher ups at Nintendo had.  That's the neoliberal problem in a nutshell.  They think the system's fine the way it is, it's just that we need the right leader, and abuses of the system aren't a failing of that system, just a failing of the wrong person put in charge.  To me, the very fact a bad leader CAN exert that much control IS the problem.  Counting on luck to deliver the right leader every time has failed us.  The system has failed us.  Capitalism has failed us.  Nintendo's steady crawl towards abusing it's customers isn't just the result of having Scrimgeour in charge here.  The whole danged ministry needs to be torn down.  They are being financially motivated to make every single decision they have made.  Once, it made sense when Nintendo was much smaller to woo customers and bend over backwards to give those customers everything they wanted and build that solid loyalty to their brand.  That no longer makes financial sense, so they no longer feel bound by that.  That ultimately is the explanation behind EVERY one of Nintendo's decisions, good or bad.  The president currently in charge is largely inconsequential in the face of that.

We'll see on this point, but given that Nintendo started releasing sketchy DLC some years back, with things like the 3DS Badge Arcade and the microtransactions in some of their 3DS and Wii U games, it's not as new as you suggest... and I don't know if it's getting worse, either.  Slightly more blatant perhaps, but in general it feels like this is a direction Nintendo has partially leaned in on for some years now without much change.  I hope Nintendo won't go harder on exploitative monetary systems in their games, but I guess time will tell.


RE: Nintendo Today - Dark Jaguar - 5th January 2023

I was including the 3DS and the Wii U in that discussion, and i'd say they really are sliding deeper down that hill from those early experiments.


RE: Nintendo Today - A Black Falcon - 5th January 2023

(5th January 2023, 12:09 AM)Dark Jaguar Wrote: I was including the 3DS and the Wii U in that discussion, and i'd say they really are sliding deeper down that hill from those early experiments.

Ah, okay.  I probably mostly agree, but has Nintendo really been leaning in even harder on this stuff?  You're probably right, but I'd like some examples. Their mobile games have been that way since they started making them, and their Switch games don't seem much worse on this front than the 3DS an Wii U were... though tonally it is worse since you don't have Iwata there and you have focus-tested ideas instead.


RE: Nintendo Today - Dark Jaguar - 7th January 2023

Nintendo has been publishing microtransactional games on the Switch itself now.  There's that DOTA Pokemon game for example.  That's another step down the road to damnation.