Nintendo is a “family friendly” brand before all else and really only cares about the experience of children playing their games and adults buying their games for children to play. They count on their core IPs to draw in those kids as adults, but don’t put much effort in catering to an adult audience. They put more effort in with the Switch (game store with more adult oriented games), but still minimal effort - their original properties are family friendly.
They see other people using their IP as diluting their brand value rather than promoting it. They think their characters are what makes people nostalgic for their games and drives brand value. So they want you to only be able to see your “favorite Nintendo characters” from Nintendo official sources and have complete control over that experience.
I think they’re wrong about most of that. The characters are, for the most part, pretty generic and simple. What people like about Nintendo is that the games are accessible, they played when they were kids, and they were often introduced to those games by parents or older siblings. There’s a social context to Nintendo games that is unique and nostalgic. They’re often some of the first games you play as a kid, and they’re the first games you think of when you want to introduce your own kids/nieces & nephews, etc. to gaming. I don’t think that unofficial Super Smash Bros tournaments or Gary’s Mod having fan-made Mario models in it dilutes that in the slightest but Nintendo does drive away adults who are the primary drivers of the Nintendo brand’s popularity (as they are the purchasers). Once it’s these young adults’ turn to share Nintendo games with the next generation, I think Nintendo’s litigiousness will hurt them because it will have driven many of these people away.
Horizon Zero Dawn is a good game in that it is pretty, has an interesting world, and has good combat mechanics, but it is open-world in the worst way possible. It has hundreds of meaningless side quests, the rewards for which are literally just loot boxes of crafting components (often times just containing more loot boxes). Also the voice acting for most NPCs is inexcusably bad and breaks immersion, but that’s a minor gripe.
If you play Horizon, I honestly recommend sticking close to the main story and making a b-line for the end. It is a hugely bloated game.
That’s fair. It often is the case though, and I think many people don’t consider that as being a problem because it just doesn’t occur to them.
I think Valve is an example of a company that does it well, since you can download the game if Steam were ever to go under, etc. and you can add non-steam games to steam. It’s almost unavoidable that they do it well, though, since steam is running on PCs (mostly).
But Nintendo does it badly. If Nintendo decides to stop supporting Switch downloads, my digital content will vanish (unless I root my switch, etc. but then I may as well just pirate everything). But, at least nintendo has a card reader for their games - if they got rid of it, I’d never truly own any Switch game and would also be forced to pay massively inflated priced for re-released old games, crappy switch ports, or Nintendo titles which almost never decrease in price or go on sale.
I mean, maybe disk drives are outdated, but being unable to buy used games or give your old game to a friend is garbage (but great for profits of the console manufacturers and game studios). Not to mention that as long as it’s a digital download, you don’t own the game - you lease it at a flat rate.
Limiting the options and ownership rights of the consumer for profit is bad.