Topic: Next Nintendo Direct?

I get what you're saying with the money, but I'm not sure that calculation actually holds water.

Yea, on its face, it seems pretty "duh": Why put Metroid Prime 2, for instance, on NSO where people get it "free" with their 30-buck annual membership, when you could remaster it and re-release it for 60 bucks a pop? (We'll say 60 for the sake of argument, but Prime Remastered was like 40 or 50, right?)

So, let's go by Prime numbers: the last sales numbers I can find were a bit over a million a year ago, but let's be super generous and say it's sold 2 million.

NSO numbers last I can find are 38 million back in 2023, so let's also be generous and say 40 million. And of that 40, I don't know - wanna say half are paying for the Expansion Pack? So we'll say 20 million, being generous by saying the more high-profile games Nintendo puts on NSO, the more people will bump up to Expansion Pack (I know I did for Banjo and Ocarina). So we'll just smudge the 30 bucks annually down to 20ish, guesstimating that half-ish people go for the higher tier and half-ish don't. I think 20ish is fair, too, because we're not accounting for the pricier family memberships.

Ok, so, you're Nintendo and you need to make these calls when it comes to money. You wanna pay a developer to give you a separate release remaster that will sell 2 million copies at 60 bucks a pop? Heck, say you make a stand-alone remaster release and it winds up selling 4 million copies! Go with that math if you want. Or do you want your internal guys to set up the emulation for the game to get it on NSO to an audience of (potentially) 40+million at 20ish bucks a pop, all of which you need to work at retaining so they keep paying you 20ish bucks a year for the next bajillion years.

So... like it or not, what I'm laying out for you here is likely what companies see when it comes to "games as services" type crud versus the traditional single-release system. Personally, if NSO didn't exist and Switch was still just single-release games regardless of new or remaster or remake or whatever, I'd be a happy clam. But I think this shows you how alluring it is for a company to skip the dev costs of remasters, put the emulation of their "service," and keep raking in the annual subscription money.

Or I misread your comment entirely and I'll go back to my chicken dinner.

Either way, won't be subbing past the base model for the online. 20 dollars is a massive ask for a service that offers nothing useful and makes you pay for peer to peer online play. I'm not paying more for old games that I may or may not want. Rather just buy a remake for a game outright.

@rallydefault I would be really curious how many people actually buy expansion pack — is it 20 million or 2 million? Nintendo refuses to say and I have no good guess.

38 million makes a lot of sense for basic NSO-- twice that many people have Animal Crossing or Mario Kart 8 or Smash and all those games need NSO to be fully functional so a lot of parents probably buy it for their kids along with one of those games. But expansion pack? Sure it has 2 DLCs for the most popular games, but unless you're from a big Nintendo-loving family where it makes sense to get family pass, I don't know if expansion pack has much pull to 'typical' Nintendo owners.

@GrailUK Whether you "loved it" isn't the issue. The issue is did you love it as much as other original Wii U/Switch games?

I don't see it. In what way (other than graphically) were they more complex? They played mainly the same, aside from Wii games starting to adopt online. They were about the same size, amount of content, and had about the same level of depth to their mechanics. The only thing they were really better at was graphics and gimmicks. I don't really see the added complexity that the GC and Wii had (especially the GC).

@FishyS Yeah I'm also curious on how many bought the Expansion pass. Given that it offers barely anything of value outside of basically just more old games. I know in Japan it's probably more popular given emulators are illegal, but I wonder how popular it is in the West.

I’d say we probably hear from Pyoro either Monday or Friday. Monday if it’s this week (which is seeming less likely), or Friday if it’s next week (seems more likely)

Honestly I think it's this week. Nintendo usually aims for the first two weeks of a month, not the middle or last.

June 21st last year so... 4th week kinda. Really depends on whether Nintendo plans to be part of the summer games activities or not. Last year they waited and did their own thing.

GameCube on NSO is inevitable I just don't think it's imminent. Especially not before they put the two Zeldas out with HD versions on Switch (2). And I think there are other systems, other games and other offers they could push through NSO before they need to pull the GC/Wii trigger

Also for the people who think GC is too new. The Wii launched almost 20 years ago. The GC is about as old now as the SNES was when the Wii launched. Obviously there's a significant gap between 2D and 3D and the jump in fidelity in the late 90s was bigger than anything we'll ever see again. But these are not new games

Thursday June 20th, possibly?

If we see Pikmin 4 DLC, a Kirby game (Robobot remake?), Mario Wonder DLC, New Leaf HD, Luigi’s Mansion 1 HD, or a Mario Baseball (one that maybe has at least as much content as the Wii version?), I will be satisfied with the Direct. Honestly just hoping for 1 thing I’d be excited for, even if it’s something unexpected I didn’t previously mention.

@skywake For me it's less that the games are new and moreso that the games feel more complex than SNES games. They just feel like titles that Nintendo could still remake or redo and make a lot of money off of as if they were titles that came out today.

@VoidofLight In terms of profitability, GC games haven't really done too well in general, most of them are ~1 million sellers (I guess if you count 3D All Stars as a "GC remake", that's an exception), so they aren't exactly raking in the money from remaking.

In terms of them being "more complex", yeah, they're more complex than the arcade tier fare of the NES and GB, and maybe a tad more involved than SNES games, but more than N64? I'm still waiting for you to answer how they're more complex than N64 games.

@Bolt_Strike Graphically and mechanically a good amount of them are more complex than N64. There's a good difference in terms of how design is approached and in terms of how the general games end up playing. The concepts that are expanded upon as well. A lot of the N64 titles were fairly simple both graphically and in terms of gameplay, all due to the system basically being 3D in its infancy. A lot of titles that came after were more memorable due to how Nintendo got more comfortable developing games in 3D- and the more comfortable they got, the more complex those titles would get as a result.

Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess share a similar formula, however Twilight Princess is more graphically substantial and more polished with its general gameplay mechanics. The dungeons were able to be made far larger, the scope of the world at the time was pretty massive. There were more mechanics that made use of 3D spaces, such as the spinning top and the magnet boots.

Ocarina still holds up a bit more today, but a lot of the N64 titles were just simpler with how they handled specific mechanics or gameplay as a whole. Mario 64 to Sunshine is a pretty good comparison, given the stuff that Sunshine was able to pull of which Mario64 never did.

Or things like Pikmin existing due to how the gamecube allowed for more complex character models to be rendered at one specific time.

Gamecube games are more on-par with modern titles than they are with N64 titles. N64 titles outside a hand few are pretty primitive still, and a good number are just unfun for me to play personally.

@FishyS the expansion pack is great for friend groups. I just added all my best friends to my family account we go in together on the expansion pass for like $10 a year each.

@VoidofLight
The complexity argument is fair and we certainly did see a dramatic ramp up in complexity through the 90s. Late 90s and early 00s games are very almost modern in a way that early-mid 90s games are definitely not. There hasn't been that kind of advance in gaming before or since over such a short period of time

But the value of those games does still go down over time. On the Wii U they were selling Wii games on the VC for ~$20AU or something. When the Wii VC launched they were selling N64 games for about the same. So while my 90s kid brain struggles to think of Gamecube games in that way they most definitely are. They are losing their value, and there will certainly be a point where the best place for them is on something like NSO

........ but again, not imminent and not before they squeeze a few more million sales out of those Zelda games

@skywake Ahh yeah, I can see that. Maybe in like 10 more years or so we'll see Gamecube games on NSO- if it still exists. Until then, I'm still crossing my fingers that my favorite Zelda gets the proper remake it deserves.

(I also am scared to think that eventually the Switch Zeldas will fall into the same retro category one day).

Yeah I don't agree with this. Besides OoT, really all of the 3D adventure games feel about as modern as GC and Wii games. Games like Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie, DK 64, Conker's Bad Fur Day, those don't really feel all that simplistic. Mario Kart 64 was a massive jump in map design because of the 3D graphics, but Double Dash doesn't really feel like a huge leap, it just adds the double racer gimmick (Wii does, but the series of Wii -> 7 -> 8 was kind of a ramp up in mechanics for MK). Then you have some 2D platformers like Kirby 64 and Yoshi's Story, which are a bit simplistic but they're not much more simplistic than 2D platformers that we've seen on more modern consoles like Wii and Wii U. As for Pikmin, that is a new IP for the GC but aside from the mass number of characters there's no real added complexity there. So again, IDK what you're talking about with the jump from N64 -> GC being a jump in "complexity". It was almost nothing aside from a jump in graphics.

But... N64 games ARE Late 90s game. Remember the N64 was from 1996 to 2002, the N64 WAS late 90s and the argument here is about the distinction between Late 90s and early 00s. Void is saying that there is a significant distinction, I'm saying that there isn't. I would say the ramp up really occurred from the NES -> SNES -> N64. That period the industry went from simplistic 2D arcade games to large, open 3D titles. And since those two console transitions occurred in the 90s that fits your timeline.

@rallydefault Sorry for distracting you from your chicken dinner! Totally get where you are coming from. But selling physical and individual copies of games is firmly in Nintendo's DNA. And if they are going to be adding DS, Turbografx (for example) beforehand, they might as well have their cake and eat it and remaster . remake until they are ready for GC. They can only do so much bless em. If NSO was any cheaper it would be free lol. They may as well put games there when they have exhausted their main business model. I'm not saying GC games aren't coming, but I'm not going to pretend that it's worth talking about yet, because it's years away and I'm not a Youtuber who needs to chat crap for an excuse to make a video lol. And I certainly don't want to sound like I think they put games there to die. Nintendo NES Championship prooves they can think of new ways to play with old games. Granted, without narrative or plot, but gameplay is in Nintendo's DNA too.

@Bolt_Strike
I think you're being a bit pedantic about the timeline in my post. I was talking about the kinds of games we were seeing in the early to mid 90s (i.e. SNES/MegaDrive) vs the ones we were seeing by the late 90s and early 00s (i.e. Dreamcast, PS2, GC, XB). The fact that the N64 was late to enter and leave is a bit of a pedant's side-note to the broader point I was making

That ten year period was insane in terms of technological advances. And I don't care how dogmatic you want to be with that "anti-graphics" bit you always want to push, you can't convince me that the jump from OoT to Wind Waker or Goldeneye to Halo or even Super Smash Bros to Melee wasn't significant. Or the change from GTA2 to GTA3. Things were moving fast over that entire decade in a way that they just haven't since

So I can understand how some people feel like GC is "too modern" for NSO in some respect. Because in a lot of ways the GC kinda marks the point where the rapid acceleration of tech caught up with the ambitions of developers. And since then it's been very slow and incremental in comparison

edit: I guess it's mostly because we shifted from the era dominated by hardware limitations into one dominated by development resource limitations. The kinda of games we saw in the GC era can still exist today, just with more pixels. N64/PS2 style games these days only really exist as a deliberate aesthetic

There's a reason why "looks like a PS2 game" is an ongoing meme. It's because, to some degree, PS2 is when we "stopped"

@skywake Nintendo at the time liked to think the Gamecube was a 3D SNES.