Topic: An Open Letter To Nintendo

Hello!
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I am well aware this will never reach any one of any importance over at Nintendo and if it ever does I am positive they won't care, but I want to say this regardless. I recently read that Pokemon Go profited $115 million last quarter. While part of me wants to congratulate you, part of me wants me to beg you to stop this. These "free" mobile games with micro-transactions are murdering the video game industry. I understand this is a cheap and easy way for you guys to make a LOT of money. You look at the model and go, why would we put a ton of resources into a game that we are going to sell to a person once for a marginal fee when we can put next to no effort into a game that a person is going to pump money into FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. Now with Mario Go out I just fear the worst. Come 2020 you may just give up and the only games we will see from Nintendo will be exclusively mobile games with such titles as: Hyrule Castle Keeper (some sort of combination of zelda and castle crashers), Dk's banana bounce (basically just Mario Go with a Donkey Kong skin), and the new Kirby app (which is basically nothing, you pay micro-transactions so that kirby can "eat" another app allowing you to use that app in the Kirby app). By the way if any of these become real I expect royalties. You are supposed to be the gaming industry we can trust, so please lead the way out of this mobile gaming hell. Show those other companies that you are better than this. Just please, save the gaming industry. Thank you, once again, to anyone who took the time to read this.
Sincerely,
A concerned gamer.

I think a more pressing concern is the state of your gums

A few counterpoints:
1. Nintendo, as far as I can tell, didn't have much involvement in Pokemon Go. It was mostly Niantic and The Pokemon Company.
2. While I personally believe that free-to-play games should generally have an "unlock all" feature (to mimic purchasing a full-price retail game) as an alternative to microtransactions, there are some positives to free-to-play. Non-serious gamers can test the waters of a game without any financial commitment - sort of like a demo. The zero-cost entry makes the games very accessible. Also, for many free-to-play games you can get near maximum enjoyment without spending a penny at all. I put hour upon hour into Pokemon Go (playing almost every day from July to November) and barely spent a penny. That was excellent value for money in my opinion.
3. Mobile gaming =/= console gaming. I'd be worried if big Switch titles had microtransactions, but for now they're separate. FTP games on mobile are accessible, making them good advertising for retail games that don't use this model.
4. Ironically, Super Mario Run was criticised for not having a free-to-play model, and instead requiring a one-off, up-front purchase.

Too much reading, too lazy.

Nintendo is DOOOOOMED!!!!

That's my line! hisses

it looks like you dont fully understand that people are going to make money because they have to survive. and if they should find a quick way to do it more power to them.

but it appears you must have some understanding about making money...even its just for yerself.

I'm sure Nintendo will get to reading that any minute now...

The funny thing is that Pokemon Go and Mario Run are IMO good examples of how to do mobile correctly. Pokemon Go doesn't bombard you with ads aside from sponsored locations. Which if you think about it is interesting because it means they're also advertising parks, churches, street art and libraries. And while they do have micro-transactions it's not pay-to-win by any means. Your game doesn't stop if you don't pay and the most useful item in the shop (incubators) is completely random anyways.

Then there's Super Mario Run. A mobile game that has been mostly criticised for treating mobile pricing as if it was a home console. It's a game that basically gives you a demo for free as you'd find on a traditional console. It then tells you that if you like the game you can pay $10 and unlock the full game. This isn't a new thing. That's been part of the console landscape since demo disks were glued onto the front of magazines. The only odd thing about Super Mario Run is that mobile doesn't usually work like that. Super Mario Run is Nintendo putting their foot down and saying the game is worth $10.

I texted screenshots of your letter to Reggie.

He said, cool story bro.

I will forward this to my superiors, but I gotta say I don't think they'll be happy about this. If you have any Nintendo consoles connected to the internet be careful. Reggie might pull the plug on you

Ya, there's nothing anyone can do about mobile gaming. It exists and it's not going anywhere, no matter how much we may not like it.

I understand you love playing Nintendos games (as do I) and fear for losing those games. While it is possible that scenario could play out, it isn't likely. They'd likely go 3rd party long before they'd go mobile only, and while I would loathe the day Nintendo hardware dies off, at least their games would live on.

So one way or another, we're probably not gonna lose our Ninty games we love so much. Not in my lifetime anyways.