Hmmm, I’m definitely not an expert in the gaming industry, but I’m struggling to see how it could be good for consumers. It’s probably good, when Sony or Microsoft buy small studios and let them produce projects they wouldn’t produce otherwise. But Nintendo is not a small studio that’s struggling to survive.
Also, less innovation. Nintendo, for better or worse, always does its own thing. Sometimes that turns out bad, but often it turns out interesting at least and amazing at best. PS and Xbox do mostly the same thing with small gimmicks that are sometimes just dropped (kinnect 2). Nintendo goes all out with stuff that nobody else does. Like the combined portable and home console, handheld with 3D, a console with a giant board controller, a console with nunchucks as controllers. It goes outside of the box boldly and people rightfully love it for it, even if their hardware is most of the times weaker than the other console makers.
I can't imagine that Xbox or Playstation would want to get rid of the business rival that deliberately not competes with them on the same level.
It’s good in the sense that Nintendo is sitting on a lot of old games and rather terrible at republishing them. Nintendo Switch still has no VirtualConsole support from what I understand, which is absolutely ridiculous. I’d expect Microsoft to address that. It would also mean Nintendo games becoming multiplatform, which would also be a welcome change.
The downside of course is that Nintendo is rather special in the gaming world. They are still doing a lot of quirky, innovative and family friendly stuff like it’s the 90s. That’ll be lost sooner or later when absorbed into Microsoft.
It’s like when Disney bought Star Wars. They homogenized it to make it more palatable and ended up making it dull and unappetizing. Neither franchise has a soul anymore. Just a formulaic plot with a set of waypoints in a dull 3 act format. Sprinkle in some in-humor, pedestrian jokes, and a special effects budget that would make the Pentagon blush and you have a recipe for dull tripe.
How would they plan to do that? Foreign investment in Japanese companies is heavily regulated, much more than it is regulated in the Americas or Europe.
The all digital design would certainly prevent me from buying an updated model, which is unfortunate since I do appreciate the backwards compatibility.
It’s a cynical move to get all game purchases done through their storefront and eliminate game reselling, and it will lock out a lot of price-conscious consumers who need to wait for a good sale, or buy used games.
On top of that, it’s a huge blow towards game preservation, since the logical next step would be to stop producing physical games. Even other publishers might think twice before producing a physical game if only a third of the base can even use disks.
Often people bring up that games can ship incomplete and need updates; but even a non-updated game is still more playable than a digital one when the servers aren’t maintained, and there’s no reason to remove the disk drive. You can still play digital games on a console with a disk drive.
All in all, this is a pretty disappointing update for me.
As someone who more and more appreciates having physical discs of media I agree with what you’re saying. We’re seeing not just games but media disappear because they’re digital only.
Digital is super convenient, but it also means you don’t own anything. I’ve still got N64 and Gamecube games and I can play them today. But when specific servers go away I’m out my games from the PS4, PC, etc. Even the few I have discs for. It’s such a bad feeling. Wish more games would launch without needing to be online all the time, especially for single player games. Seeing the depreciation of disc drives makes me sad.
even a non-updated game is still more playable than a digital one when the servers aren’t maintained
Or if your account is banned. We’ve heard many stories about accounts being banned by mistake or after a successful hacking attempt. And it’s not that simple to unban yourself, sometimes only media attention helps, which is not that easy to get.
Short of legislation that requires these machines to allow you to hook into alternate digital storefronts, or a requirement for even console purchases to be DRM free, I don't think consoles will ever have a bright future for preservation regardless of a disc drive.
I fully agree that game preservation is not a priority for any gaming company. The playability of old games and not requiring paying again for a remaster/ release can only hurt their bottom line.
The good thing is that they don’t have to like preservation, or even support it, when there’s physical game disks. In 40 years if I have a copy of Breath of the Wild and a working Switch, I can still play it; but the same likely cannot be said of a digital copy.
The fact that companies care so little for (or actively dislike) game preservation is the very reason physical games are so important.
No, I'd say that's why you want DRM-free games. Plenty of games don't even get physical releases because the economics don't make sense, and then they get crucial patches that fix game-breaking bugs. Your console will break over a long enough timeline, and eventually the parts to fix it won't be produced anymore; I doubt your Switch will still play Breath of the Wild 40 years from now. Basically the only way to preserve modern games that makes sense to me is to make them run on PC, DRM-free.
The playability of old games and not requiring paying again for a remaster/ release can only hurt their bottom line.
Nah, because making that remaster or re-release costs them money and is more of a gamble than just putting out the old version for cheaper. Most of GOG's business is built around this, and then you see things like Sega putting out a huge collection of their ROMs entirely DRM-free with ROM hacks built into the Steam workshop.
Do any recent games have their full data on the disc anymore? I figured they had become too big, and that the disc merely serves as a licence to download it online anyway.
My understanding is that most games come with the full game data on the disk, though it’s a little more of a gamble if some will be left as a download on the Switch carts since they charge by cart size if I recall correctly.
Having said that, it would still be the unpatched game data; but that’s still more playable than a digital copy when the servers are no longer maintained.
It’s also worth noting people with bad internet speeds can prefer the disks since copying 50-150GB is a lot faster than downloading it from the internet for them.
This is both interesting and terrifying at the same time. I’m not much of a Nintendo fan these days, but I don’t think Microsoft would really help things if they acquired them. But I also doubt Nintendo would sell… Can they be taken over hostilely (acquire them through buying a controlling number of shares)? I am not sure how that shit works if the companies are in totally different countries, even if both are publicly traded.
Silksong has already had some kind of deal with Microsoft in place, so if it shows up on a platform holder’s stream rather than their own thing, it’s more likely they show up with Microsoft than Nintendo. Given that it got content rated already, it’s still due for a release this year, so maybe we hear about it with Gamescom.
No, it showed up at an Xbox showcase in 2022, where every game was going to be on Game Pass day 1 and releasing within 12 months, which would have meant the game would be out by June 2023. Silksong wasn’t the only game that missed that 12 month window, but it showed that, at the time, they were confident that it was nearly done, and that they took a deal with Microsoft, because being on Game Pass day 1 means Microsoft offered them a huge bucket of money to make up for lost sales.
IIRC, Lucasarts had a massive legacy reputation as a publisher, but toward the end of its life, the public perception of Lucasarts had soured after the cancellation of Star Wars Battlefront 3. According to the developer Free Radical, Lucasarts cancelled the game, didn't pay the developer for creating a "99% finished" game, the developer went bankrupt, and then all the assets fell into Lucasarts's hands since it was their IP. These assets were then repurposed to create Renegade Squadron for the PSP.
This is the Direct where they announce Twilight Princess and Wind Waker for the Switch. I can feel it! I wish they would, but I’m not holding my breath.
Yeah, if I remember correctly they’ve said they’ve been working on or have completed a remastered Oracle of Ages/Seasons in the style of Link’s Awakening.
I agree! I thought it was A Link to the Past or the Oracle games remastered in the Link’s Awakening style. I didn’t think we’d ever get a game where we played as Zelda!
I waited for years for them to release them on the switch and I finally just emulated them on the steam deck. Not sure why Nintendo doesn’t want my money
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