Hardly inevitable. I'm broke af, the economy is collapsing, so not spending money on Nintendo is the easiest possible choice.
Literally not buying something you don't need is the easiest form of protest.
Giant Bomb deserves more than a thread hanging off the Polygon story post. I don’t think it’s ever looked nearly this dire.
I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled across GB, but I think it came up randomly during TheSpeedGamers Final Fantasy marathon in 2009 (which was the inspiration for the first GDQ marathon in 2010). They weren’t necessarily the first to do the very personality-focused, video heavy, gaming coverage, but they definitely went at it the hardest and with the fewest fucks given about doing anything the “right” way. I’ve spent over 16 years now following the site and the people that have come through it, the Giant Bomb Extended Universe. I couldn’t possibly quantify the impact they’ve had on me over the years. It may not technically be the end but I don’t see a path forward from here.
Giant Bomb deserves more than a thread hanging off the Polygon story post.
Agreed. Giant Bomb pioneered so much in games media, and for it to end like that is such a shame.
As far as I am concerned, the GB I loved was already struggling after Alex, Brad and Vinny left ; and it ended for good when Jeff Gerstmann was fired abruptly (again !). This news still saddens me however, and I wonder what will be the legacy of GB down the road.
Without knowing anything (beyond what’s said in the article) about Giant Bomb, I’d assume it’s the same path forward as when the F-word fucked up Gamepedia beyond all recognition. Find alternatives. In the case of Gamepedia other wiki hosting services, like Miraheze and wiki.gg, and more independently-hosted wikis. And some of the wiki.gg admins were Gamepedia admins, as far as I’m aware - it sounds like a similar restart may well end up being the case here too.
It sucks, especially because the F-word is good at search-engine optimisation, but it’s not the end.
Damn, for me Jeff, Dan and Mitch/Mike formed the new nucleus and were quite entertaining.
Usually I am open to change, when it comes from a creative directive. However Giant Bomb seems increasingly to be jerked around by corporate interests in faster intervals. I have doubt’s that GB will keep its identity and not just be a name.
It might end up just being a name for game guides, which sucks, but that core nucleus will still be doing Blight Club in some capacity, and Jeff will still do his news show. I think the same thing will live on by another name, just like the old school lives on in Next Lander and Gerstmann’s solo thing.
I thought Game Key Cards, while not something I would ever buy, weren't the end of the world if they were just meant to replace the existing practice of code-in-a-box for games that won't fit on a cart. It's actually less bad than that, so I didn't get out my pitchfork just yet.
But the sheer number of games being released in this format is alarming. Code-in-a-box was rare, this is looking like it's outnumbering proper physical games. And many of these games don't even make sense to be key cards, they can fit just fine on a cart. There are ports of Switch 1 games that already fit on Switch 1 carts in here!
Switch carts are proprietary and expensive. Rumor has it that 64 GB is the smallest cart you can buy for the switch 2. And corporations will do anything to save a buck.
I’m hoping that at least Nintendo will release their full games on the card. The truth is I’m probably not buying many third party games on Switch that aren’t exclusives.
Afaik, they are. It’s just that third party developers would need to optimize their file sizes heavily for the great pay off of reducing their profit margin. They already didn’t want to do that for the Switch and Nintendo now enables them to not do it to incentivize more ports.
At least in Japan, I think, every 1st party game comes on the cartridge, pretty much every third party game except for Cyberpunk comes as a code.
Not inevitable if people fought back… but people keep telling companies this shit is ok by paying them to screw everyone over. Companies used to have to replace your bugged cartridge with a patched one or risk backlash and profit losses.
Nintendo also sells all their games digital and you can’t transfer those.
Yet.
They’ve advertised Virtual Game Cards as a value-added feature to let your friends borrow games, but I’d bet good money they built out that infrastructure to comply with the potential for the EU to require used sales on digital.
There are Virtual Game Cards, purchased and downloaded digitally from the eShop. These can now be traded, sold, gifted, loaned, etc. to other friends, which was not previously possible. (This could possibly require an NSO subscription, but I’m not clear if that’s true at all.)
There are physical game cartridges, which contain the actual game on them, and (from what I’ve heard) most games will be distributed this way.
Then, there are also physical carts that contain only the virtual game license file, thus that you have to possess the physical cart in order to download or play the game. Apparently, there are Switch 1 games like this already, but they are rare.
With the introduction of Virtual Game Cards, it is no longer possible (even on Switch 1) to play more than one copy of a game online at the same time, even with a min NSO Family subscription.
People also lost their shit over the PSP Go being digital distro only in a physical handheld console, and lost their shit so hard that Sony of all people walked it back with the Vita and built cartridges back into the spec. (And it became retroactively excusable once it was discovered how easily the PSP/Go could be hacked, and suddenly the Go was the desirable model for emulation and, er, backups. But that’s neither here nor there. Under its intended use, within its original lifespan, it was a stupid idea.)
If you ask me the entire point of a game console is to be a dedicated platform that you stick games in and it always works. If I wanted to fuck around with downloadable only content, games that are only keycodes, patches, day 1 DLC, always-online DRM, and the inevitable day the servers all go dark I’d just game on PC. Which, come to think of it, in these modern times is exactly what I do anyway. I have game systems dating all the way back to the Atari VCS which I can to this very day if I feel like it slap a cartridge or disk in and they play. To me, there is immense value in that. Without that, there’s really no need for the “real hardware experience” for me. I can just emulate if any title comes out that I truly give enough of a shit about that I must play it. Anything else is just selling you a rental, but at full price. I find that immensely distasteful.
So I have zero interest in the Switch 2, and thus it will be the first Nintendo console in history I don’t own, or aim to own (I do not have a Virtual Boy, much to my shame and embarrassment.) I imagine I’m not the only one. Nintendo’s been trying very hard to lose the plot, which for a company as profitable and famous as they are takes a real concerted effort. Congratulations to them, then, if that’s the goal – What we are witnessing here is very possibly the beginning of the end for big N.
Not to defend Nintendo much here, but the situation with game-key-cards is at least better than that. You can freely trade, give away, resell them like any physical cart.
It’s a step up from digital in terms of freedom, but a step down in convenience (cart has to be in the system).
Compared to real, physical, data-on-the-cart media though, these are a definite downgrade.
I’m willing to bet that 95% of their customers do not have an issue with this. Probably the majority don’t even realize that someone could have an issue with this. People are already very used to having to do big downloads with games and a lot of switch 1 games were already requiring half of the game to be downloaded due to large cart costs. Also tbh I don’t think it’s really a preservation issue as long as piracy exists.
I’m willing to bet that the majority of people don’t really care about this. If they did, you’d see GoG do wildly better than Steam does. People like DRM and the convenience with having your library digitally available with the ease of installation, they just don’t like badly implemented DRM.
It’s like a virtual license file for a game. It’s basically the same system as before but now you can trade them with people on your friends lists.
People with kids: be sure to set parental controls on this before your kids are bullied into sending away all the games you bought them
WDIT: I see the article is not actually about the virtual key cards but the physical ones. This is a game cert without the game on it, just the license file. You still have to download it.
Honestly I think that fucking sucks because they can just take it away from you.
Even going back to the 90s video game magazines and their reviews were ragged on as marketing material for publishers but there was still some semblance of reverence over the years for the big magazines and websites (IGN and Gamespot. Maybe 1Up). After the Kane and Lynch Gamespot review fiasco, that to me was when gamer internet discourse over game journalism tanked to ever worsening hostility towards games reporters/journalist.
That Kane and Lynch review scandal tanked Gamespots reputation. That was probably also the era of making fun of the game awards guy as the Dorito/Mountain Dew Pope with that Spike TV video game award show
The ~2010’s, official game review scandal which all big videogame influencers like IGN, G4tv, Gamespot etc… (this was before instagram and tiktok) got bribed by corporations so the aftermath of that was splintergroups of indie review sites like GiantBomb. And so let’s plays got born. Still never trusting triple-A game marketing ever again
The ~2010’s, official game review scandal which all big videogame influencers like IGN, G4tv, Gamespot etc… (this was before instagram and tiktok) got bribed by corporations
Got any sources for that? Unless you think advertisement are bribes, this didn’t happen.
Jeff was fired because he didn’t want to change his low score for a Kane & Lynch game, after Gamespot was pressured by the publisher, who was running some huge ads on Gamespot. He also said that usually this doesn’t happen, because the review side and marketing on these big sites are completely separate, and the reviewers don’t hear of these complaints. In his case however, Gamespot had new execs, who got cold feet, and caved. They left shortly after.
I have never heard of anything else like this happening, except from angry fanboys, that think reviewers are on the take, when Zelda gets an 8.8.
OP, please do us a favor of titling post with the true thesis of the article, and not their disingenuous headlines. E.g.
Ziff Davis, Inc. $ZD has contracts with $NTDOY & ¥7974.T that it selected three people to blurb out things that aligns with their portfolios:
Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios (which specialises in modern remasters of older, often out-of-print games) said that “seeing Nintendo do this is a little disheartening”, adding: “You would hope that a company that big, that has such a storied history, would take preservation a little more seriously.”
Videogame Heritage Society co-founder Professor James Newman is somewhat less convinced that Game-Key Cards will be a major issue, noting that it’s rare for a game on a cartridge to still be the same game years after release.
“Even when a cartridge does contain data on day one of release, games are so often patched, updated and expanded through downloads that the cart very often loses its connection to the game, and functions more like a physical copy protection dongle for a digital object,” he explained.
Meanwhile, Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at The Strong Museum in New York said the move to a future where all games are digital is “inevitable”, and that Nintendo has in fact been “in some ways, the slowest of the major console producers to be going there”.
videogameschronicle.com
Aktywne