Topic: Next Nintendo Direct?

@rallydefault The speculation is the NS2 announcement trailer was rushed out due to leaks. Meaning it was not the original plan to post the video that day.

@RobLife1
Still happened, though, yea?

@skywake
Technically not even a rom in a box because it’s not getting a physical release lol

I agree that Fire and Leaf will likely sell well, but I'm not sure why I agree.
I mean, who is the market for them?
People who played when they were younger will not be impressed by the lack of online play (When you grow up and get jobs you often don't live near your friends), and younger gamers will want newer games like ZA, and presumably won't be impressed by graphics far worse than apps on their tablets.

I think not giving customers choice can justifiably be called anti-consumer. The word 'scam' I think is the one mis/overused.
Take the fact that those already paying for the NSO+ have to buy something extra just to play the Virtual Boy games, when a 2D option would have been very easy to provide. Apart from anything else, Nintendo advise gamers to only play with the headset on for 30 minutes at a time, so it's bizarre they don't provide a non-headset option.
I do genuinely think that is anti-consumer. It's not illegal, but I don't think anyone is suggesting that.
Add that apparently in some regions people paying for NSO+ can't even order the gear (according to some comments on this site) and it is truly appalling.

@Uncle_Franklin,

"I mean, who is the market for them?"

Me, obviously 😛. I'm only in my late teens, but I've been wanting to play a classic, unedited Pokémon game without spending hundreds of dollars for the original hardware (which I don't have) in good condition.

@Nep-Nep-Freak
Fair enough.

Did you not have a 3DS?

@Uncle_Franklin, I was... aligns years... almost two years old when the 3DS came out. By the time I was starting to get into video games more, the Switch was already in high gear. And I didn't even know the 3DS existed until a while after that, since I wasn't allowed on the internet that much until the early 2020s and my parents skipped both the Wii U and 3DS, jumping straight from Wii and DS to Switch.

So, to answer your question, no, I did not have a 3DS 😅. Though I did buy a used 2DS in the summer of 2023 for $130 (the 3DS eShop was already shut down by then), but I didn't get to play it much before it broke down on me in the summer of 2024 because the charger slot got twisted somehow (I did take good care of the thing, I swear). I was about 15 minutes away from beating Pokémon Moon 😢.

@RobLife1 Oh wait you have a point- Mario Day lands on a Tuesday so they could possibly put out a Movie Direct trailer then and there, and then announce a few discounts on Twitter or something.

I'd still say there's a chance of a March 12th Direct, but the 19th is looking a lot more likely now.

@Uncle_Franklin
It is both extremely puzzling and totally expected for Nintendo to require one of the headsets for Virtual Boy.

I would still hesitate to call that sort of thing “anti-consumer,” though. I would just call it dumb.

But I was also raised in the 80s, so I’m used to sleeping in asbestos and thanking Johnson & Johnson for the opportunity.

@Dyna-Z The last few MAR10 presentations have included game trailers, it is also the 40th marketing campaign this year. I am saying they would just do one presentation on MAR10 like past years.

@rallydefault Has anyone tried playing without the headsets? I wonder if they just said that for various reasons.
This would be similar to how the gamecube NSO controller is only sanctioned for NSO GameCube games but it can be used with any games (just weird button scheme for some).

There sadly seems to be a silent majority of casual gamers that just don't do research on how good a game is, they just buy on name recognition, hype, vibes, etc. Pretty much anything with the word "Pokemon" on it will sell millions simply because so many people know what Pokemon is and that just seems to be enough for them to say "yes daddy please". Very depressing market behavior to be sure, they've made themselves easy marks for corporate greed.

@Nep-Nep-Freak
Well now I feel old.
I think the (original design) 2DS was a great underrated bit of kit.
And Virtual Console was great on that family of systems.

@rallydefault
We're not supposed to be sleeping in asbestos?

@RobLife1
I have, it's not great.

@Nep-Nep-Freak holy moly I feel old now.... And I'm not even 25 yet, so that shouldn't be the case. I'm well aware that I'm younger than plenty of other folks on the Internet, but apparently I'm now at the point where I'm also older than plenty of them. Anyways, I'm gonna go cry now lol

@RobLife1
There are some videos out there about it - you technically can still play it, but only in handheld mode, and it outputs two extremely tiny mirrored images on your Switch screen. It would be pretty insane to actually play anything in the format.

@Uncle_Franklin
Apparently not, no. Something about health and lungs and all that.

@Nep-Nep-Freak
Take care of your Wii and NDS.
They have tons of amazing games with huge variety.
You will not find something like Wii or NDS games on Switch again.

@Bolt_Strike
I think casual audiences are not educated enough to have awareness.
Granted for us as gamers who have broaden taste to try other stuffs not because they are popular, but they are also great enough.
Less educated people will think popularity = better products.
Those casual audiences need some shock therapy by make them try other stuffs they have never knew before and suck it up. Make them like better stuffs than the lame popular stuffs.

I'm in pretty much the same boat. Like, there are real things that really should be considered anti-consumer, because they subvert legitimate consumer rights ( keycards for one, at least in the way the vast majority of publishers use them ). "Pricing a game more than I personally want to pay" is not one of them. The only right a consumer has regarding price is for it to be truthfully advertised. A company setting the price too high might be a stupid move, but it can't be "anti-consumer", not unless there is coercion in play. . . which there definitionally can't for a luxury good like a video game. Nobody is holding a gun to your head forcing you to give $20 for the Pokemon game if you don't think its worth the money, so you can just. . . not buy it.

( I suspect there is an underlying strain of entitlement, where "Not buying something" is viewed as unthinkable. If you want something than its "supposed" to be priced at a level that you wish to pay for it, and if its not, that constitutes a wrongdoing against you. The idea that you might have to make choices, and these choices involve tradeoffs? Alien, or itself viewed as a wrongdoing. )

I would view having to pay for a headset to play games on a service you're already paying for,
could be construed as the price not being truthfully advertised from the outset.

@Uncle_Franklin Interesting take there.

I would view it as an addition made 8 years after the service launched, and this impossible to truthfully advertise the price from the outset, because you can't convince me they intended to manufacture and release Virtual Boy back in 2017.

Likewise though, take PS Plus. It has PSVR titles. They advertised those games sure, but I need to go spend hundreds on a headset to play something I'm already paying for.

Or, does is the cost of the service balanced by how much you will get from it regardless of the one library that requires a peripheral? If the Virtual Boy was half of all NSO content, sure, but it's not. At most it will ever be just over 20 games.

Out of hundreds, for the cost of one month of other subscriptions.

In that circumstance, the price is advertised accurately.

@Haruki_NLI

Yes, good points, suppose it hinges on if they advertised the Virtual Boy app to begin with, which they didn't in fairness.