Nintendo, while aggressively litigious, do so to maintain the value and exclusivity of their IP.
Their games also never go on sale, and all sell really well over time, unlike many releases from other publishers.
The result is that Nintendo are able to release a solid cadence of high quality, first party games free of other forms of aggressive monetisation, maintaining the value of the games as art.
Unpopular for sure
Thank you. My switch collects dust btw, mostly play PC and on the steam deck.
But Nintendo definitely aren’t releasing an NFT loot box driven live service game any time soon, which almost seems to be a necessity for the other big publishers.
They just released a gatcha-style pokemon TCG for mobile a month ago, and they’ve released a bunch of them previously based on most of their big IPs. They focus those on mobile instead of their consoles is the only difference.
Playing the devil advocate here but I don’t think these games on mobile generate that much revenue compared to the main titles + console sales
They absolutely do. Some of the biggest whales are those that play on mobile.
Mobile games yes, but the nintendo’s games? They are that popular? At least in my country I don’t see much of them here.
I watched a 50 year old middle-management-looking gentleman on a train in Japan pull cards in the Pokemon TCG mobile game for like a full 15 minutes when I was in Japan a few months ago. That game has a death grip there
Ok they are probably making a ton of money with that too, in my bubble these games are so unpopular, barely saw people playing or talking about the TCG or the MOBA one, the Yu-gi-oh one is so more popular here that is not even a competition.
Nintendo is just as bad as the “other big publishers” and your sentiments aren’t founded in reality. Their gacha practices, frivolous licensure of hardware, and constant patent trolling bring the games industry as a whole down as people like you paint them as a forerunner. I’ll try not to write a whole TED talk but no promises.
Someone mentioned just the Pokemon TCG, but almost every mobile game nintendo has released has had one of the worst dollar spend ratios out of the genre they chose. Fire emblem? Obscenely expensive. Pokemon go? LONG time gating unless you cheat or pay. Dragalia Lost brought in tens of millions annually - 1 in 200 chance from the average loot box for a dude. Don’t get me started on pokemon quest, one of the most “get mom and dad’s credit card” games ever devised. Literal loot boxes were only removed from mario kart tour late 2022.
Nintendo has a couple of exceptional quality teams but those teams would be that quality with or without the Nintendo brand attached to them. There is nothing special about the company or the manner it is run when you compare it to the other major gaming companies, right down to release quality being low for many games because of crunch and share-driven deadlines. Hell, some of their flagship franchises have been victim to it recently (Pokemon titles).
Nintendo puts their seal of approval on peripherals for their systems - have you ever bought a nintendo brand microSD for the switch? Grandma has paid 4x+ the price every year for a nintendo switch branded microSD that might not even come in a file format that works on the switch. All this, of course, to support the console with bar none the worst online connectivity that you must pay for, that cannot be improved by any means. Seriously, the ethernet dongle makes absolutely 0 difference in stability or quality if one player is using it, and it hardly improves things even when all connected players are using it. Insane waste of money.
Anyway Nintendo literally does do that. They are greedy (mobile game cost:return ratios), corner-cutting (trash licensed peripherals), and draconic in the way they patent vague game interactions and prosecute anyone for trying to innovate in “Their space” (see the recent patents locking everyone except nintendo out of the sleep game space). They lock access to their games away from the public, and what they HAVE done is re-release, at full price, decades old games for limited times (Mario collection).
There’s interviews confirming they have interest in NFT and Metaverse titles going back to 2022, it is a matter of time. TL;DR the corporation is not your friend and you are only considering a tiny fraction of what they do.
I’m under no illusion Nintendo is a good or moral company.
Fair point on their mobile games, I don’t pay attention to that space. Almost all mobile gaming monetisation is based upon sucking in whales anyway though.
I wasn’t even aware of the Nintendo branded microSD. I suppose I could say that for Nintendo you can upgrade storage with off the shelf storage, can the same be said for the other consoles? PS5 storage upgrade is a rip off too.
We’ll see about Nintendo NFT gaming. Maybe in the mobile space I’ll admit if the industry normalises that shit.
I’m not even a Nintendo fanboy (mainly PC and PS5) but just appreciate that they don’t overspend on their releases ($600 million dollar failures like Concord don’t happen for them).
I think we need smaller scale, higher quality games that don’t need to justify their ridiculous development cost by pivoting the game design into in-game spend.
This is an incorrect way of looking at it. It’s not an all or nothing circumstance. Nintendo is simply the flip side of the same coin of publishers abusing consumers. The PC gaming world is filled with good publishers selling high quality games at full price with no abusive practices (heavy litigation or mtx). As well as indie developers who do sales and dlc but are ethical in their design. You just have to look away from the marketing behemoths who want to syphon your wallet dry.
Its not a neccesity for anyone, its just a cash grab. Nintendo doesnt do it because if they did, people would simply stop playing their games. Outside of the good reputation they somehow have, their game quality is fairly low. They do pioneer a lot of new ideas afaik, but they are far from doing them the best. BOTW and TOTK are their most impressive games, which arguably dont have a real competitor, but between Palworld, Genshin Impact, and Fenix Rising(which i think is also nintendo, oof) they arent particularly impressive.
My point is that nintendos reputation and good consumer side service, they can take risks that other companies cant, because they will sell regaurdless. Hence, if they reduce their consumer side service(loot boxes, microtransactions, paid dlcs, etc.) they dont really have anything to stand on.
Same boat as you but I’ve also got a shelf with thousands of dollars of switch games :S.