24th July 2024, 7:32 AM
(This post was last modified: 24th July 2024, 7:39 AM by Dark Jaguar.)
Oh trust me on this, EVERY gaming company has this attitude.
And frankly, you know me, you know my attitude towards an obsession with "runaway growth", so with my known bias well in play let me say right now that I think Miyamoto's attitude is remarkably measured and reasonable! Yeah, you didn't expect that from me did you?
Of course a company wants to make profit off their game beyond just breaking even. No company will last long chasing their own tails. There was a point in my life where I was literally just eeking out enough money to pay for the costs to continue working a job I hated. It was a cycle that made not working at all pretty much financially identical. So, I get this. This is basic business sense.
If he's saying having one 30 million sales game every three to five years makes then "fine as a company", that's not greed, that's steady reliable business. MS, Sony, Ubisoft, EA? None of them would ever utter the phrase "that's all we need". No chance. To them, every year's profits must be EXCEEDED the next year, and the next and the next, forever. Runaway growth is the goal, and of course, that's an impossibility. If Miyamoto actually means what he says here, this is a far more sane, rational attitude to take. Make your business sustainable, yes, sure, that's perfectly healthy. Like a mom & pop shop, all you really need is to make sure you're making a little extra for rainy days and some luxuries that make it all worth it. Now, if your goal is to just grow and grow, eat up or kill the competition, and find new ways to exploit your customer base to stack on top of all the tricks you've already used, and THEN in that most profitable year of your business, you fire everyone that got you to that point? Well, that's NOT sustainable. Infinite growth has always been the big lie.
I say all this while still recognizing that Nintendo are guilty of a number of things themselves. Their mobile phone games are very exploitative (with exceptions like Super Mario Run that use the old Apogee Shareware model which I love). Their amiibo line has basically become their version of microtransactions, they ONLY make their classic games available to RENT now rather than providing a purchasing option (I think part of their reason for killing off the Wii U and 3DS store when they were still profitable was to increase the "value proposition" of their virtual console subscription service), and the way they treat fanart is potentially criminal. They release some DIGITAL games on a "time limited" basis completely arbitrarily, and turn off services for very popular online games just to keep up that FOMO. They're not completely innocent. But, it has to be said that when it comes to their mainline games, they are MOSTLY very customer friendly. Yes, Super Smash Bros is now filled with way too many costume packs, but outside that? Their DLC is pretty much exactly how DLC should be handled. Breath of the Wild got two "mini-expansions", Mario Kart 8 got entire cups worth of courses, and so on. Indeed, they don't even do the thing other companies do and force a game to come out every single year in their big pillar franchises. Pokemon is the one exception, and I think Nintendo are seeing how that's hurt the reputation of that series, as people are largely burnt out on it coming that fast and furious for so long, to the point that their latest entries are incomplete buggy messes of games unbefitting Nintendo's usually high standards. I think they're going to course correct that series.
But, keep this in mind. They're good at BUSINESS here, not "capitalism". Capitalism isn't a skill set, it's an ideology.
And frankly, you know me, you know my attitude towards an obsession with "runaway growth", so with my known bias well in play let me say right now that I think Miyamoto's attitude is remarkably measured and reasonable! Yeah, you didn't expect that from me did you?
Of course a company wants to make profit off their game beyond just breaking even. No company will last long chasing their own tails. There was a point in my life where I was literally just eeking out enough money to pay for the costs to continue working a job I hated. It was a cycle that made not working at all pretty much financially identical. So, I get this. This is basic business sense.
If he's saying having one 30 million sales game every three to five years makes then "fine as a company", that's not greed, that's steady reliable business. MS, Sony, Ubisoft, EA? None of them would ever utter the phrase "that's all we need". No chance. To them, every year's profits must be EXCEEDED the next year, and the next and the next, forever. Runaway growth is the goal, and of course, that's an impossibility. If Miyamoto actually means what he says here, this is a far more sane, rational attitude to take. Make your business sustainable, yes, sure, that's perfectly healthy. Like a mom & pop shop, all you really need is to make sure you're making a little extra for rainy days and some luxuries that make it all worth it. Now, if your goal is to just grow and grow, eat up or kill the competition, and find new ways to exploit your customer base to stack on top of all the tricks you've already used, and THEN in that most profitable year of your business, you fire everyone that got you to that point? Well, that's NOT sustainable. Infinite growth has always been the big lie.
I say all this while still recognizing that Nintendo are guilty of a number of things themselves. Their mobile phone games are very exploitative (with exceptions like Super Mario Run that use the old Apogee Shareware model which I love). Their amiibo line has basically become their version of microtransactions, they ONLY make their classic games available to RENT now rather than providing a purchasing option (I think part of their reason for killing off the Wii U and 3DS store when they were still profitable was to increase the "value proposition" of their virtual console subscription service), and the way they treat fanart is potentially criminal. They release some DIGITAL games on a "time limited" basis completely arbitrarily, and turn off services for very popular online games just to keep up that FOMO. They're not completely innocent. But, it has to be said that when it comes to their mainline games, they are MOSTLY very customer friendly. Yes, Super Smash Bros is now filled with way too many costume packs, but outside that? Their DLC is pretty much exactly how DLC should be handled. Breath of the Wild got two "mini-expansions", Mario Kart 8 got entire cups worth of courses, and so on. Indeed, they don't even do the thing other companies do and force a game to come out every single year in their big pillar franchises. Pokemon is the one exception, and I think Nintendo are seeing how that's hurt the reputation of that series, as people are largely burnt out on it coming that fast and furious for so long, to the point that their latest entries are incomplete buggy messes of games unbefitting Nintendo's usually high standards. I think they're going to course correct that series.
But, keep this in mind. They're good at BUSINESS here, not "capitalism". Capitalism isn't a skill set, it's an ideology.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)