Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

Or Nintendo could go the PlayStation route and charge you $18 a month and still not let you play their main games without paying $70 a pop.

@Pizzamorg For sure on the Gold coins.
I bought their game voucher recently so that I could buy Paper Mario and something in the future, and was surprised to still get nearly 5 pounds worth of Gold coins back for that! Sort of makes the vouchers about £79 in the grand scheme of things.

I don't know anyone could look at the past couple of years and think a streaming service would be a good addition for anything.

The only issue with Nintendo games in that regard is they hate the very concept of them getting a good enough sale anywhere ever. Plenty of their games sell well but no one's buying Astral Chain again apparently, because its a forgotten about 60 dollar game. And I think that's a shame. Like I'm pretty sure it sold a million copies in a month and has yet to sell half that in the entire 4 and a half years since then.

@kkslider5552000 In terms of sales there are a lot of older Nintendo exclusives on Switch I never wanted enough to buy near full price but if I could snag them for $20 digital I probably would.

On the other hand of the argument you have e.g. Square Enix. I see new Dragon Quest Game and think 'yay I will definitely get that but it will be 50% in less than a year so I definitely won't get it immediately'. Which as a consumer I don't mind, but I can understand Nintendo not wanting to get caught in that trap.

@NintendoByNature @Jhena Yeah it's such a good game. I already wanted more by the time I finished the last level. And we did get more in the form of Super Mario 3D World, which I also loved.

@FishyS You know, I wouldn't mind seeing another Mario Party game for the Switch before its successor comes out. I enjoy the MP series quite a bit. It seems likely too, we've seen MP games come out late in Nintendo consoles' time on the market... a couple examples being Mario Party 3 and Mario Party 7, those came out near the end of the N64's and GameCube's lifespans, respectively.

We know people primarily buy games in the launch window, which is why publishers use pre-order bonuses and whatnot to incentivize early buy-in, followed by cratering the price once 95% of the interest drops off in successive months. Which is one strategy (call this the 'Ubisoft model'), but people quickly wise up to what the company is doing and a large fraction of them will avoid buying the game in the window of time when hype is highest and they're most likely, statistically, to purchase the game at all.

I think Nintendo knowingly and willfully sacrifices some profits on their less popular older games by maintaining a pricing structure that heavily incentivizes early buy in with their products. This trains customers to overcome hesitation regarding early investment in their software and buy when they're psychologically most heavily primed to do so.

Also, their biggest games will continue to sell well years down the road at full price, which probably more than helps offset the lost profit from not dropping prices on older games that people wouldn't be buying in massive numbers anyway.

Psychologically, it probably also leads people to associate the name "Nintendo" with premium quality. Quality that they're willing to pay top dollar for. Seeing Nintendo titles cluttering bargain bins clouds and conflicts with that association.

@Ralizah agreed, I myself have NP paying a company for whom I support and back anytime (b ' ' )b

I actually don't like any subscription services, like gamepass, NSO or PS Plus. I'm sure there's some value to them, but I've never been a fan. Gamepass in theory is really good value for example and I think it is especially if you don't care about having physical games in any capacity.

I suppose it's not as big of a deal to me since I very rarely play online games now these days outside of FF14 . And to think I used to play some much online back during the 360 days, but It could be that I simply don't have as much time as I used to .

I think Game Pass has great value, but I just can't gin up the excitement to play anything through it for whatever reason.

I signed up (for PC) last fall, spent around 80 hours (over several months) playing through Powerwash Simulator (lol seriously. I thought this was going to be some little 5-10 hour experience, but nope. Didn't even touch the DLC), looked through the rest of the catalogue and just felt meh. Have since went back to working on my Steam backlog.

Game Pass is a stupid idea from Western company Microsoft because they are lazy and have zero passion in video games.

Honestly, while many people keep saying "Gamepass has great value," the service is mostly just made as an attempt to make people even less attached to owning their own games. Sure, you get a ton of games that you can play for cheap- but the service itself is modeled around how streaming services function (while not being a streaming service). It means that you can effectively pay for all of these titles, but if the brand deals for the titles being on there expire- then the games will be removed in turn. This will basically rob people of being able to replay the games they love, especially in the future if this were to become the primary mode of playing games.

Right now though, I doubt we have to really worry about that- seeing as Gamepass is one of the primary reasons microsoft is suffering at the moment.

It's weird to think because at the same time Gamepass is the only reason Xbox is relevant at all these days. Anytime Xbox is brought up, its usually because of something to do with Gamepass.

@ShonenJump121 It's a double edged sword. It's the only reason why the XBOX brand is still around today, but at the same time it's also hurting them at the current. They plateaued with growth, so they're pretty much no longer making profit with it. The acquisition of Activision Blizzard pretty much caused them to bleed money- and they still haven't been able to make it back. They believed Gamepass' growth would be enough, but given that it's stagnant now, it's a detriment. No one is buying an Xbox and no one is buying the games on the system. They're mostly just subbing to a platform with a cheaper price and getting all the games for free.

@ShonenJump121 My biggest issues is that ps plus and nso force you to pay for it just to play online games which sucks, I really wouldn’t mind it if it was just a side service you could get.

It seems like a waste to spend all this money acquiring all these studios to do nothing with them, but I assume the only real need was for Candy Crush and Call of Duty. Those two would be enough to bring in revenue by themselves.

Where do people get the idea that Microsoft is losing money from? They're one of the most valuable and profitable companies on the planet. Even if you're just taking their games businesses by themselves, they're still bringing in revenues about 50% bigger than Nintendo.

Activision notionally lost money last year, but that's only because they were paying out hundreds of millions in golden parachutes to the company's former executives. Their underlying profitability isn't in question.

Their "problems" largely just stem from having set themselves absurdly ambitious targets for growth and profitability that they're inevitably failing to meet. That's why it particularly irks me to see them shuttering studios and sacking developers because there's no need for them to do so. They might shore up some investor metrics in the short term, and the multi-million dollar executive pay packages that depend on them, but they're ultimately going to compromise their ability to make new games in the long run.

@Matt_Barber I'm not saying Microsoft themselves are the ones losing money. It's moreso that XBOX isn't being as profitable. It's apparent by how they're cutting massive corners with companies, getting rid of them primarily. Even smaller titles are being hit hard. The thing I'm just trying to get across is that XBOX was banking on Gamepass to make back the money lost by their massive acquisitions, and it's being said that it's backfiring on them at the moment due to how subs plateaued.

Unpopular opinion : remakes of old games, like paper Mario, should only cost around $25, UNLESS significant extra modes, features, levels are added to significantly increase longevity of said game.

@VoidofLight you’re right. The Xbox hasn’t really ever made them a profit. And the series x/S consoles have failed to sell as many as even the GameCube (a console deemed to have failed).. and that’s combined numbers from both systems.

@VoidofLight That's the thing though. They're not losing money. They're already profitable and the cost-cutting is entirely about making bigger profits. I'm as disappointed as anyone to see the closure of Tango Gameworks and the other studios, but let's not ascribe desperation to a move that can be adequately put down to corporate greed.

As for the takeovers, they were funded out of Microsoft's cash reserves, so it's not like that had to borrow money or divert it from existing studios. The aforementioned one-off costs put Activision into the red last year, but their underlying profit is pretty strong. Nobody had to get sacked to pay for that takeover, it's just more investor-metric polishing.

Game Pass isn't losing money either, at least unless you think they're flat out lying to us. They're starting to plateau because they're hitting saturation point. With 34 million subscribers and only around 30 million sales of the Series X, it's pretty obvious that they were going to hit the buffers. Some of those subscribers will still be using an XB1 and some might be PC exclusive, but I wouldn't be expecting either to provide a lot of growth in the future. Rather, anything beyond than that is going to have to come from a cloud service that's currently in beta. Maybe it'll eventually be good enough for them to hit their 100 million target, but that's anyone's guess and I doubt they're betting the farm on it.

I'm not against criticizing Microsoft, but it's got to be based on reality. They're not struggling. Rather, they're loaded, have a huge market share and can do better for both their employees and their customers.