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Phil Spencer: "getting [acquiring] Nintendo would be a career moment for me"; Nintendo's future "exists off of their own hardware"
(www.resetera.com)
Archive link: https://archive.ph/NF2r0
At some point, getting Nintendo would be a career moment and I honestly believe a good move for both companies. It's just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time.... :-)
Boy would I love to see Nintendo's future in the hands of anyone except Nintendo. That's the only way their future will be off their own hardware, and probably the only way they become less of a barrier to game preservation. For those of you afraid of Microsoft absorbing Nintendo and becoming a monopoly, check the date on that e-mail and rest assured they can't get away with it anymore anyway.
@ampersandrew @UrLogicFails for better or worse Nintendo does things their own way. You can bet you'd see yearly mario kart releases if that IP belonged to anyone else, and I don't think that would be for the better.
Is that the worst thing you can think of? Because that sounds like more than an acceptable trade if it meant that I could legally buy a ROM of Super Metroid I could play on my Steam Deck, or if I could legally play Tears of the Kingdom on a machine that can run it at 60 FPS, or if the first F-Zero game made in 20 years wasn't a live service battle royale with an expiration date baked into the game.
@ampersandrew @UrLogicFails worst thing I could think of would be yearly bland releases barely worth playing and gutting the innovation they bring.
It's not like every release is brilliant or great (looking at you pokemon violet/scarlet), but look at what happened to Blizzard pre and post acquisition.
I already think Mario Kart is bland and not worth playing, so you'll need a harder sell for me. Also, the yearly release model is just about dead these days; very few can pull it off still, and it tends to not be as lucrative as just making DLC for one major version at a time, like Nintendo is already doing now with Mario Kart. The truth is, at this point, I don't care what kind of quality Nintendo's games are made with if they're sticking to the business practices they're using currently. I haven't bought Tears of the Kingdom or even pirated it. My time and money are better spent with companies making better products.
@ampersandrew @UrLogicFails better is subjective for sure. But if you got a list of better games I can play with my 5 year old, I'm honestly all ears. So far nothing is beating Mario Odyssey and Pokémon Eevee.
Preservation wise and business practice wise I'm also not sure of anyone is 'good', but I'd again be more than happy to be better educated on the subject.
You can sit a 5 year old in front of all sorts of games that they'd enjoy, but Mario and Pokemon is what they've been exposed to, by you or friends or both. You'll have a difficult time arguing with them over the importance of how your individual market actions have lasting effects on what gets produced; that's true. But Nintendo only has a monopoly on marketing kid-friendly games, not producing them...not that that will matter to your 5 year old.
As for preservation, server dependencies are bad. F-Zero 99 requires a server and a subscription to be played, full stop. That game will not survive, and other battle royales or even other "99" games are already being decommissioned and will cease to exist. Online multiplayer can still exist without server dependencies, via private servers or LAN or direct IP connection; these features are becoming increasingly rare for business reasons, so keep your eye out for them. Without these features, multiplayer will disappear at some point. DRM is bad. While it often doesn't bother people who purchase legitimately, sometimes it does, including long after the initial release period, if that DRM hasn't been patched out, because the company authorizing the DRM usually doesn't care about the repercussions of it two decades from now. Baldur's Gate 3, not a game to play with your 5 year old for at least another decade, has all of those multiplayer features and is available DRM-free. BG3 will be preserved. The gold standard for preservation is open source, where anyone can view the code and change it, which means it will always run on whatever computers we use in the future. This is why Doom is ported to everything with a screen and an input device. But open sourcing your game is a hard sell for developers.
@ampersandrew @UrLogicFails okay but how is Nintendo worse than other companies in that regard? Is microsoft or Sony better at the preservation than them in some way I don't understand? Are they better companies to support in that metric?
As for the kid thing, they don't really get much pick in the matter of what game I let them try yet. It's just that I can't FIND any games outside of Nintendos stuff that is quality and fun for the family. It's mostly poor quality IP tie ins. I've looked!
Both of them make PC ports now, which are automatically better for preservation, since PC is an open platform rather than a walled garden. Neither is perfect. They both put out live service games that are bad for preservation. But Microsoft especially is better at making their back catalog available for purchase years and years after release. Nintendo hunts down ROM sites and gets them shut down but won't make their old games available in a state that their potential customers are willing to pay for them.
Random game suggestion: Luigi's Mansion 3 is a great coop game that I'm sure you and your daughter would love