Two decades from now, people will talk about how Nintendo managed to ruin itself, from a gaming behemoth to some gacha subsidiary bought for a single yen.
I worded it in a dumb/certain/silly way but, unless drastic changes happen, I do find it likely to happen.
Look at how often Nintendo is surfacing negatively on the news:
harassing a small dev studio over patents,
trying to kill emulation while profiting off it,
bricking hardware already sold to customers,
demanding unreasonable prices for new games,
dictating if you shall be allowed to feature one of its games in a speedrunning event…
Nintendo stopped being seen as a company that enables your fun, to become one that gatekeeps it. That’s brand damage - and really bad for Nintendo’s console sales; people are only willing to invest in a console if they’re reasonably certain they can have fun with it.
And at the same time, there are voices within and around Nintendo pushing the company towards the mobile market. Remember Pokémon Go? Or Ishihara saying the Switch 1 would flop, because of smartphones? If Nintendo console sales decline meaningfully, those voices will become louder and louder. Eventually Nintendo will focus primarily on the mobile market.
However people don’t typically buy mobile games; the monetisation strategy is completely different - microtransactions, gacha, lootboxes, all that crap. Most players (the “minnows”) won’t drop a penny on the game, but huge spenders (the “whales”) compensate for that, so it works.
The minnows aren’t just freeloaders, mind you; they’re required to keep the game alive. So mobile game companies need to fine-tune the pressure in their games - it should be just enough to encourage people to spend some money on the game, but not enough to shoo the minnows away.
But we’re talking about Nintendo here. A company willing to damage its own brand for a few additional pennies. Nintendo would not be able to see all those minnows and say “hey, that’s cool”, it would go full “ARE THOSE FREELOADERS STUPID? DON’T THEY KNOW THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BUY STUFF?”. It would tune the pressure way up, and ruin its mobile market, after it ruined its console market.
…perhaps it should go back to selling playing cards.
Nintendo has ALWAYS been like this. The SNES could easily play games from Japan on the NA console. But Nintendo wouldn’t allow it. how? look at a North American SNES cartridge. notice those notches on the bottom? inside the console where you plug the cartridge in you’ll see two pegs for where it connects to said cartridge. just little plastic pegs. Japanese Super Famicom carts didn’t have this. So how do you play Japanese games on your US SNES? remove those pegs.
you remove those little plastic pegs and suddenly your SNES is region free.
Nintendo sits on a load of hard cash and has Apple-like profit margins. They’re not going away anytime soon and I think that’s for the best. They’re one of the last AAA publishers focused on innovation in gameplay which is why I can forgive them being mildly brain damaged sometimes.
No load of hard cash is large enough to allow a company to systematically screw things up; specially not under an economic system that equates “stable profits” with “failure to grow”.
And Nintendo’s actions aren’t the result of [metaphorical] brain damage; there’s a consistent pattern here of exploiting brand value for short-term profit.
I’ve read that with current Nintendo finances they can afford to not make any profit for something like 10 or 20 years. I genuinely think that they’re not as much as malicious as they are stuck in very outdated thinking that’s prevalent in Japanese business. They don’t get any short term profit from things like this.
Nintendo doesn’t work like your typical western companies where failing to increase profit each quarter = death (investment funds like blackrock play a big part in this, but that’s a different story).
They have a number of mobile games, but they don’t invest heavily on those, despite said games being high earners - Fire Emblem Heroes’ revenue has decreased consistently year by year, but still brought in ~48mil dollars in 2024. If anything, that’s proof that they are not exploiting brand value for short-term profit. Their problem is a brain-damaged overzealous protection of their IP, which isn’t uncommon in Japan: Johnny and Associates controlled with an iron fist all the photos and videos that could or could not be shown of idols under their management
Two decades from now, people will talk about how Nintendo managed to ruin itself, from a gaming behemoth to some gacha subsidiary bought for a single yen.
I sure fucking hope so but I also doubt it
I worded it in a dumb/certain/silly way but, unless drastic changes happen, I do find it likely to happen.
Look at how often Nintendo is surfacing negatively on the news:
Nintendo stopped being seen as a company that enables your fun, to become one that gatekeeps it. That’s brand damage - and really bad for Nintendo’s console sales; people are only willing to invest in a console if they’re reasonably certain they can have fun with it.
And at the same time, there are voices within and around Nintendo pushing the company towards the mobile market. Remember Pokémon Go? Or Ishihara saying the Switch 1 would flop, because of smartphones? If Nintendo console sales decline meaningfully, those voices will become louder and louder. Eventually Nintendo will focus primarily on the mobile market.
However people don’t typically buy mobile games; the monetisation strategy is completely different - microtransactions, gacha, lootboxes, all that crap. Most players (the “minnows”) won’t drop a penny on the game, but huge spenders (the “whales”) compensate for that, so it works.
The minnows aren’t just freeloaders, mind you; they’re required to keep the game alive. So mobile game companies need to fine-tune the pressure in their games - it should be just enough to encourage people to spend some money on the game, but not enough to shoo the minnows away.
But we’re talking about Nintendo here. A company willing to damage its own brand for a few additional pennies. Nintendo would not be able to see all those minnows and say “hey, that’s cool”, it would go full “ARE THOSE FREELOADERS STUPID? DON’T THEY KNOW THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BUY STUFF?”. It would tune the pressure way up, and ruin its mobile market, after it ruined its console market.
…perhaps it should go back to selling playing cards.
Nintendo has ALWAYS been like this. The SNES could easily play games from Japan on the NA console. But Nintendo wouldn’t allow it. how? look at a North American SNES cartridge. notice those notches on the bottom? inside the console where you plug the cartridge in you’ll see two pegs for where it connects to said cartridge. just little plastic pegs. Japanese Super Famicom carts didn’t have this. So how do you play Japanese games on your US SNES? remove those pegs.
you remove those little plastic pegs and suddenly your SNES is region free.
Nintendo sits on a load of hard cash and has Apple-like profit margins. They’re not going away anytime soon and I think that’s for the best. They’re one of the last AAA publishers focused on innovation in gameplay which is why I can forgive them being mildly brain damaged sometimes.
No load of hard cash is large enough to allow a company to systematically screw things up; specially not under an economic system that equates “stable profits” with “failure to grow”.
And Nintendo’s actions aren’t the result of [metaphorical] brain damage; there’s a consistent pattern here of exploiting brand value for short-term profit.
I’ve read that with current Nintendo finances they can afford to not make any profit for something like 10 or 20 years. I genuinely think that they’re not as much as malicious as they are stuck in very outdated thinking that’s prevalent in Japanese business. They don’t get any short term profit from things like this.
Nintendo doesn’t work like your typical western companies where failing to increase profit each quarter = death (investment funds like blackrock play a big part in this, but that’s a different story).
They have a number of mobile games, but they don’t invest heavily on those, despite said games being high earners - Fire Emblem Heroes’ revenue has decreased consistently year by year, but still brought in ~48mil dollars in 2024. If anything, that’s proof that they are not exploiting brand value for short-term profit. Their problem is a brain-damaged overzealous protection of their IP, which isn’t uncommon in Japan: Johnny and Associates controlled with an iron fist all the photos and videos that could or could not be shown of idols under their management
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