my other big takeaway from my posts about Warner Bros. Discovery’s headlines in the past couple days, which i’ll put in its own post/thread here because it’s fairly unrelated to the OP there, is like. why are we even talking about Nintendo’s issues / non‐issues right now. they’re not doing mass layoffs. they’re not pivoting to games‐as‐a‐service even when their offline single‐player games demonstrably perform better both critically and commercially. they’re not looking to keep anyone from ever owning a video game as a piece of software ever again. they’re not posting apology letters on Twitter after every or any game launch. what they are doing is selling consumer‐friendly products and generally being a good employer. at this point there’s hardly anyone else left in the video game industry on the same scale as them who are consistently acting with such a baseline level of general decency and not mindlessly indulging in the current era of unprecedented corporate greed. Tears of the Kingdom didn’t even keep any weapons/armour amiibo‐exclusive (just paraglider fabrics and Epona) or launch with dumb DLC (i have never bought BotW’s DLC and never will). i’m not about to waste my energy on talking smack about Nintendo when they’re just about the only place i would even be willing to work in this industry right now.
- he/him
🇨🇦 Aspiring game designer/programmer/musician. Speedrunner and pianist. Privacy advocate. Feminist. Trans rights. 8‐time February 29th survivor. Wario. My brain’s probably worth a lot of money!
in reply to @GFD's post:
I'm too much of a coward to make a post like this in public yet (especially bc emotions are running high because of the Yuzu and Bowser lawsuits) but yeah I tend to agree somewhat.
They're definitely evil, but I feel like the things that are evil about them are pretty typical for corporations (crunch for workers, overprotective of IP, greedy accessory pricing, lack of preservation etc). I agree with folks that one of the worst things about them are their draconian punishments for pirates. Their other worst quality is that they don't care about accessibility or people with physical disabilities seemingly at all. But as you said there are still some favorable aspects compared to other big publishers.
They adhere to a certain traditonalism that I can almost respect. (Not to be confused with their social conservatism regarding gender and race representation which I find frustrating.) They seem mostly committed to games as a particular type of art form and product, and not wanting to mess with a good thing by going all-in on industry trends. They don't toss everything in the fire of "better graphics" or "higher live service retention." If any company is gonna stick to making physical copies of games, it's probably them. They seem to at least somewhat care about games being games and bringing joy to your life, as opposed to trying to be film. There's a part of me that roots for them to stick to a traditional idea of the 60/70 USD physical game instead of diving into an all-digital all-subscription future.
They make themselves hard to defend though, hahaha.
They also don't seem to engage in the big-swing "scale up the company by hundreds and then shed them off when you don't want them" moves that have allowed other companies to chase that high-fidelity realism.
oh there’s a reason this has no tags on it except one i made up.
i tend to care more about the inaccessibility than anything else, but that’s also so typical of Japanese video game studios in general. most everything else (including ethical problems with their hardware manufacturing, one of my biggest issues, not mentioned) could be reigned in with sane laws. yet i can’t say that for everyone else these days, who make themselves even harder to defend by just gunning for whatever they think will make them the most money and nothing else, with no reservations. no amount of regulation can fix that — only purging the C‐suite can.