F-Zero 99 is Fantastic, Challenging Fun!

[A Black Falcon]

Here's the thing.  These games are FREE.  They make no money at all directly from them.  The money is made off the Nintendo online service instead.  In light of that, there's no excuse to take the games down even if they aren't as popular as they would like.  So long as they're still making money from the online service, just keep the dang games up.

With that in mind, I don't intend to reward this kind of FOMO behavior.  "Fear of missing out" won't motivate me here.  If it dies, it dies, but I'm not motivated to renew my Nintendo Online subscription just to play a game that may just vanish forever.  At some point, I'll just pirate it down the line on a hacked Switch and play on modded fan servers instead.

Nintendo itself has only released two battle royale games, Tetris 99 and Mario 35.  One is st ill up.  The other was announced as a limited-time release and that is how it went.  With this game, no time limit was announced, so it hopefully should be available for a good long while  I'm not sure why you are so adamant to not play this game (or Tetris 99 I assume?) but it's mistaken.

One thing to remember is that this kind of game requires a large player base to work.  If you aren't constantly filling up 99 player lobbies the game dies.  Plenty of battle royale games not by Nintendo have gotten shut down, often after not very long, because it's a genre that requires a lot of players for the game to be fun and something that people will come back to instead of dropping.

Right now, F-Zero 99 has that playerbase.  It's fantastic and a lot of people have noticed and are playing it, lobbies fill up very quickly.  A bunch of the big Mario streamers I watch are playing it a lot too, and seem pretty addicted.  The big question is how long this player base will stick around.  I hope it's for a long time, but you never know, and I'd much rather enjoy this amazing game while it has that large playerbase than not play it because it probably won't have that forever.


Overall, (Jeff Minter's) Akka Arrh was my game of the year this year so far, but F-Zero 99 gives it some pretty strong competition.  This game is amazing.