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.
Didn’t have Mario Cart strange Mercedes Tie-Ins? I think that your conclusion is solid, but money is money.
Just a fact.
Pricing, yes. I don’t think legally harassing youtubers reviewing their products or games helps them in any way. Even taking down fan projects doesn’t help them. In the early 90s they sued blockbuster for renting games with manuals.
Came here to say this. Their pricing strategies definitely are justifiable but their petty lawsuits do little-to-nothing to protect their bottom line.
Upvoted because of actual unpopular opinion
This is “Darth Vader did nothing wrong” IRL
Tears was mid and not only did it ignore series lore, it ignored lore in a game it’s a direct sequel to, that and both games feel like “design by intern” when it comes to puzzles and direction.
Odyssey was… O.K. Not as tight as a Galaxy, but also not as enjoyable as the usual Mario linearity for every objective as Nintendo has more control over every experience the player has.
Samus Returns was good fun. Dread… Wasn’t a Metroid game.
Splattoon and Pokemon both fall into the categories of games they could tweak slightly and rerelease for $70 under a new title, as they do.
Other than that, what do we have to talk about, Animal Crossing? The 3DS version was better and had more to do.
…and… Then there’s Kirby. What do we even do with him!?
A+ work. They’ve never made a bad Kirby game. Bad and Kirby doesn’t exist. It’s like they could try and it would still be fun.
They did, it was canvas curse, and somehow it was still fun.
No one has any idea why.
I think the reason is Nintendo views themselves as a toy company, not a video game or entertainment company. They don’t do sales because that’s not a thing for toys, you sell the production run and move on. You aggressively attack anyone using your toys in media, because it makes them more accessible without buying them. It’s why their consoles are weird, have bright colors. It’s also why there games are generally better, as you can’t release a half finished toy and update it later.
this is unpopular opinions, not wrong opinions
releases essentially the same games for like 50 years
“quality”
You mean like Pokemon quality? Lmao
And joycon wireless communication problems quality?
Don’t get me started on joycon and pro controller stick drift quality
Haha the stick drift thing, I must have a horse shoe up my ass. I have 2 pro controllers and 4 sets of joy cons and none drift.
Nintendo as a publisher having high standards of what is allowed to be published onto their systems from 1st and 3rd party developers is what contributes most to quality of the games.
Devolver Digital is a publisher well known for publishing similarly very high quality games from 3rd party devs without being nearly as exceptionally litigious as Nintendo is going after everyone and everything that even remotely infringes on IP protections, however there is a point to be made that IP law in Japan functions very differently from the US and that plays some roll in how litigious Nintendo is.
Yeah it seems like if a kid says “It’s a me Mario” while playing on a playground some Nintendo lawyer is going to be there to smack their family down with a 30 million dollar lawsuit.
This would only make sense if Nintendo’s legal actions either actually prevented emulation or piracy of their games or recouped the lost revenue (lol).
But they don’t you can still emulate the switch and still get games for it (which was never a grey area unlike emulators). You could do for most of it’s lifetime. You could also pirate on original HW, sometimes without HW modification at all.
Emulators have existed and still exist for older nintendo systems and you can still get old nintendo games despite decades of nintendo’s legal efforts, just like you can get pirated movies or music despite decades of legal efforts…
I support their prices but most of the lawsuits are bad.
The switch emulator scene did fly too close to the sun, since they were taking donations and pirating games on day 1. Most places wait until the console generation is over before getting to work on software preservation
Has Nintendo been interesting in terms of art or gaming innovation in the past ten years? Apart from pokemon when I was a child, I only ever played some small party games at friends and I was never impressed by the games depth nor feeling the desire to get them at home.
If we’re referring to restricting who can use your IPs as a form of quality control, I can see where you’re coming from. I fail to see how jealously guarding consumers from accessing games released years ago has anything to do with the quality of what they release today.
I like a lot of Nintendo’s stuff, but I fail to see how anything lawyers do is in any way related to what their development studios do. You’re gonna have to explain how you think these affect each other.
