Topic: Do you prefer 3rd party over 1st party Nintendo games?

I suppose if you get to ever the point when there aren't any first party games that do it for you at all, you can stop buying Nintendo's hardware.

@Matt_Barber
I still need the 1st party Nintendo games, but only certain games that I have interest about since I prefer 3rd party games on either Nintendo or PlayStation machines to complement each other.
Sometimes I felt bored with limited diversity of 1st party Nintendo games so I want to expand my gaming experience from 3rd party games since they have more genre diversity and different gameplay that I might like them.

Not really. I've always loved many of Nintendo's own games, especially Super Mario, which is literally my favorite game series of all time. That alone is why I get their own consoles - you're not gonna see Mario, Zelda, and the like on any other platform. Plus if you ask me, they can't be replaced. And if I'm not into Nintendo, I wouldn't be on Nintendo Life in the first place. lol

With all that said, I do like a good third-party game as well. Or really, any game that's not made by Nintendo, provided that it resonates with me of course. Sega immediately comes to mind, and I love a lot of games that were made for the Genesis/Mega Drive. Indie games like Shovel Knight, Celeste, and Cuphead are also fantastic. There are other games I'd like to sink more time into, as well... I would like to get more into stuff like Dragon Quest and Persona at some point. I just don't know when.

Yeah I’m the same. I’ll pick up a 1st party game here and there and I pick them up in physical with the intension of selling them later. 99% of my games on switch are 3rd party. Over the years I tend to play more and more indie and retro games.

By his arbitrary logic, Phoenix Wright: Dual Destinies is the work of the devil for its (unusual) M rating by the ESRB (incidentally, it was PG in Australia, like all Phoenix Wright games before it, which is analogous to ESRB's E10+ and PEGI's 7 ratings).

It's a game about lawyers, why are you arguing it's not evil and devilish?! ;p

@jump : Tou-freaking-ché, dude.

Of course! I have the chance of playing these great games anywhere that I want!

It depends on the third-party game.

Most 3rd party games feel pretty meh. They seem like they are (and this is probably true to some degree) made to chase trends in whatever genre/gameplay style is popular and most of them just feel so artificial and soulless. I'm not really feeling a desire to make something interesting and entertaining as I do with most of Nintendo's games. Of course there's exceptions on both sides of this, but the vast majority of my games are 1st party.

If it’s not extremely violent or doesn’t heavily use profanity and nudity, I prefer third party games over first party games.

@Bolt_Strike
I think because you don't like certain games genre from 3rd party games so you felt less engaged with 3rd party games.
I personally not really engaged with the limited genres from 1st party Nintendo games.
Sometimes, I dared myself dive into genre I have never played before like 3rd person shooter from Ratchet & Clank games, movie to video games like Disney / Dreamworks games, open world sandbox from LEGO CITY UNDERCOVER, Minecraft style sandbox from Portal Knights / Dragon Quest Builders, Dynasty Warriors style from Dragon Quest Heroes games, etc.
I got some new experiences from those 3rd party games and it expanded my game choices to play so i'm not limited by vast majority of 1st party Nintendo games.

@JONOFTHEJONS
There are a lot of 3rd party kids games you can play such during this year as Paleo Pines, Paperman Adventures, Moving Out 2, Fae Farm, Fantasy Life Switch, etc.

Talking about about 1st party Nintendo games, the only Nintendo games that really out of the box are ARMS and 1-2-Switch as they offered completely new ideas in playing.
I genuinely like those games more than the older Nintendo IP like Mario or Kirby or etc as the more unusual of the games, the more I have the impression.

@Anti-Matter I was looking at purchasing Fae Farm, Moving Out 2 looks like a fun game I can play with my family members, and Fantasy Life is going to be a must buy for me, I love Level-5 as a developer.

@JONOFTHEJONS
You will love Paleo Pines if you like Harvest Moon style games and cute dinosaurs.

It will be released on this year.
Check the gameplay of Early Access Steam version on Youtube.

@Anti-Matter I love both those things, I’ll check it out, thank you for the recommendations.

If you had asked me this question not even 2 years ago, I would've most likely said 1st Party all the way: I had had my share of 3rd Party games in the past (namely Rayman, Crash Bandicoot and the LEGO games) but for the most part I was a pretty big Nintendo loyalist.

Lately though, between trying out a ton more series and getting both my old Wii and PS3 up and running again, I'd say I'm a decent mixture of the two nowadays. Ace Attorney was easily the biggest catalyst for getting me to try out new series since it was the first 3rd Party series I REALLY got invested in (if my PFP and absolute jubilation over the Apollo Justice Trilogy didn't make that obvious XD), converting me into a Capcom fanboy eager to try out every single one of their series at some point (got Mega Man, Street Fighter, Ghosts n Goblins and Zack & Wiki out of the way so far) and even now, I've tried out more indies than I know what to do with these days. I've still got that classic Nintendo bias in me, but I've been trying out a bunch more stuff these days and I think it's made me a lot happier in regards to gaming

Obviously the entire premise of this thread is a bit dumb as others have said. Even ignoring the initial post and its obvious blind spots. Nintendo doesn't make platformers, racing games, simulation games, party games, farming sims, tower defence games? I mean, if the case what are Mario and Kirby? Mario Kart and F-Zero? What are Animal Crossing and Mario Party? Rhythm Heaven, Donkey Konga, Elite Beat Agents? Star Fox Guard? Seriously....

But I think the broader mistake of this thread is assuming that first party vs third party vs whatever in between even matters in terms of a game being "good" or not. A good game is a good game, does it really matter what the financial arrangement of its development was? Are you really sitting down and playing a game only to go "well, this game would be a 10/10 however Nintendo owns 51% of the company who developed this title so it is therefore crap and I won't play it". And what happens if the ownership structure changes after release? Like when a third party developer is purchased by Nintendo or a subsidiary of Nintendo goes more independent. Does that suddenly change the equation?

What about when some of the lead developers of Metroid Prime quit Retro and were hired by 343 Industries to help make the next Halo. And then that Halo game comes out and it, naturally, has a similar vibe to Metroid Prime in a lot of respects. One of those titles was under Nintendo and the other under Microsoft. Is one automatically better or worse than the other due to that fact alone? What about when Bayonetta was developed by Platinum as a cross platform title and doesn't perform well enough to fund a sequel. But then Nintendo came in and bankrolled development. Was Bayonetta 2 somehow worse because of this?

.......... of course not

I will say though, from a raw developer standpoint? Nintendo does produce some fairly high quality content. As impossible as it is to be objective on questions of "quality" for what is literally subjective art I think we can all agree that of all the developers on the planet? Nintendo does consistently review well. If you look at the top 10 best reviewed titles of the 2010s it looks like this:
3 for Nintendo (Galaxy 2, BotW, Odyssey)
3 for Rockstar (RDR, RDR2, GTA5)
1 each for Bethesda (Skyrim), Valve (Portal 2), EA (Mass Effect 2) & SCEA (The Last of Us)

You go to any year, any decade. Nintendo are consistently near the top of these lists. Does that mean Nintendo alone is better than ALL other developers? No. Clearly not. But as a single developer they are certainly at the top of the pack in terms of critical acclaim and volume of decent content. Especially for their big titles they drop once or twice a generation. Should people broaden their horizons beyond Nintendo? For sure, there's some great stuff not made by Nintendo. However, the fact that people are able to be only Nintendo first party? I think that speaks to how good their games really are

Wow you just said everything that needed to be said about this thread in one single go! We do say a lot of stuff about Nintendo, and not all of it is great, on the outside they might make bad decisions, or do silly things, but inside, man are there games amazing, and no one does it like Nintendo, I think there is a reason they haven’t needed to make the jump to next gen lol.