Topic: Next Nintendo Direct?

@Ninfan The last time we got a general Direct in December was in 2013. Nintendo's big announcement at the annual Geoff Keighley event was Cranky Kong in Tropical Freeze and then they did a Direct on December 18th.

@VoidofLight Unless you count Indie Worlds as Directs, in which case one is definitely not off the table. November pretty consistently has an Indie World, though December might be a possibility because of Nintendo's "Inside the House of Indies" event from 2022 that was basically an Indie World spread across 5 days with a holiday theme (which, incidentally, might be one of the single most overlooked things they've done in the Switch era. No one talks about it happening anymore despite it being such a weird break from the usual). Either way, indies are likely going to be particularly prolific on Switch going forwards because third-parties are likely to jump ship to the Switch successor fairly quickly. Even with the Switch's large userbase, I can't see most of them wanting to hang around for long because of the Switch's dated hardware. Indie developers, though, will have more than enough to fill out a showcase for Nintendo going into 2025.

@PikaPhantom I don't count indie worlds as directs personally, but mainly because I don't like them in the first place.

@VoidofLight I see them as Direct-adjacent, but I'm inclined to agree - I've been increasingly dissatisfied with how they're handled. The voiceovers are extremely childish and I think the lineups they've been curating for them have been increasingly worse. Most of the indie games that grab my attention now are not ones that feature in Indie Worlds. And every time I catch an Indie World live, I end up just wishing I'd waited for the full upload to go up so I can skip around whatever doesn't appeal to me. The pacing is often poor as well - I still kinda can't believe they spent like a minute and a half just showing raw footage of Coffee Talk Tokyo in the last one. That's not particularly ideal for any game in an Indie World - I want to know what exactly makes each game distinct and worthwhile, and indies have more to prove because they're often not tied to firmly established teams or properties - but a visual novel? Kind of appalling, and I have nothing against visual novels. It also hasn't helped that Indie Worlds have leaned more into games that were already announced for Switch (e.g. Antonblast).

Essentially, I want less announcements like Date Everything and Wobby Life. Don't really have a preference beyond that, but it's been less than ideal lately, with many of the interesting games relegated to highlight reels. Heck, the Indie World Twitter often highlights games not featured in the actual showcases, and usually they're more compelling than a lot of what does make the cut - at least in my opinion. I've been increasingly trying to pay attention to indie games that slip largely under the radar, thanks in large part to events like Next Fest, and I feel like I get a lot more out of them than Indie Worlds these days. Sure, I get to cherry-pick what interests me and play through some demos, but I also get the opportunity to see if more experimental releases are my cup of tea, or that sort of thing. I'd definitely recommend looking at Steam demos if you want to try and find some hidden gems. I've picked up games like Tetrachroma, Crypt Custodian, and Phantom Spark thanks to them.

@Novamii The only large scale thing they brought outside of Smash to TGA was about a minute of gameplay footage for Breath of the Wild before the game released.

@PikaPhantom Also yeah, I don't tend to watch Indie Worlds at all due to how uninteresting they tend to be. I don't mind indie games, and I feel like a lot of them are pretty well-made, but the presentations Nintendo does for them feel very very cheap. Long stretches of time dedicated to games that don't really need that, along with rosters of games that aren't even all that interesting. A good chunk of the games they've shown off in previous events feel like they're really not as impressive as the few stand-out announcements they had a while back.

@VoidofLight I think this is at least in part because most of the heavyhitting announcements have been pushed into regular Directs. It's not like we don't get big announcements during Indie Worlds, but usually only the opening and closing announcements are particularly big now (e.g. Balatro DLC, Pizza Tower, SteamWorld Heist II). Meanwhile Directs are where we'll see games like Stray, Tunic, and FNAF. The Partner Showcase in February was especially heavy on indie games, with Ender Magnolia, Arranger, World of Goo 2, Another Crab's Treasure, Penny's Big Breakaway, Suika Game DLC, Pepper Grinder, and Tales of Kenzera all showing up. It really does feel like they've decided Indie Worlds are mostly for really small games, and Directs can have more notable or larger scale indies show up, and I feel like both sides suffer for it. Indie Worlds have a weaker curation of games, and while Directs can provide more exposure for indies than a dedicated indie presentation, it's a double-edged sword, and games can easily get lost in the shuffle. It's not like Indie Worlds are insufficient, either - they draw in a smaller crowd, but it's also a crowd that's pretty willing to pick up what looks interesting. Shadowdrops will trend on the eShop charts for Indie Worlds, and even games that release some time after tend to still do well (like Europa, for instance).

Nintendo of America still hasn’t posted since Thursday. A Direct/console reveal doesn’t seem terribly likely (although I’d love to see it) this week, but is there a chance a game could be announced? Since we don’t have a February game yet, maybe we could get one?

NoA's Black Friday sale is finally live on the US eShop.

Persona 5 Royal is down to $15 for those who don't already own it. Absolute steal of a price for that game.

Sonic x Shadow Generations is already 40% off ($30).

There's a few other good deals too

I still think Nintendo of America has gone on a Twitter blackout due to the utter collapse it’s had in recent history and then after the U.S. election. Because there’s nothing they can announce other than Black Friday sales and they haven’t said a word on Twitter. Just saying we are seeing a lot of companies jump off the sinking ship.

@FragRed There are other things to promote like today had the release of MySims (that game's climbing the eshop charts fast) and Stray (Game Awards 2022 GotY nominee) which I feel leads more into your point. Nintendo didn't promote these big releases or the Black Friday sales in the case of NoA which suggests that they're in a transition period of moving away from twitter.

@Novamii I think Metroid Prime 2 and 3 have a pretty good chance of releasing before Prime 4. I thought back when Prime 1 got a rerelease on Switch that they’d do 2 and 3 before 4, and I still think they will. I don’t really see why they wouldn’t, and it would probably sell pretty well (especially considering they’d probably just be ports)

NoA is back, they returned to promote MySims.

Maybe NoA's social media people were just all on vacation for a few days...

@Novamii It's like when radio stations call late 90s and early 2000s music 'oldies'.

@IceClimbers Those are some good deals! I may be forced to get both even though I didn't want to spend more on games right now...

I think people are on the mark that NoA went silent because of the mass migration over to bluesky. While they advertised MySims today- it wouldn't surprise me if Nintendo is getting things ready to move over to Bluesky instead of remaining on Twitter.

@VoidofLight Wouldn't Nintendo want to be on both? There are only 20 million people on bluesky compared to 400 million on Twitter.

Although I suppose an advantage of bluesky is that people without accounts can still see the messages.

@FishyS If Nintendo moved to Bluesky from X, that would be pretty much declaring defeat for Switch 2. X has such a huge reach at this point especially compared to other platforms, that if this transition happened the audience (especially the casual audience) likely wouldn't follow. Rejecting the entire following they have on Twitter especially during a console transition is a bad idea. I don't even know why people are considering this an option tbh
As someone who doesn't have social media, I am still able to see Nintendo's posts pretty much as soon as they happen. The embed is a lot better here at Nintendo Life as well over the bluesky one, so I hope we don't get this transition.

I could see Nintendo making a bluesky account as well, but getting rid of the Twitter one seems out of the question.

Then again I'm no social media expert so I could be totally wrong about this, but to me it seems like Nintendo gets a lot of attention and makes some of its biggest announcements through Twitter.

I don't think they'll get rid of the Twitter super soon, but given that people are actively fleeing from Twitter to Bluesky due to Twitter becoming a hellhole of racism and harassment- I don't think it'll be too far flung to believe companies are going to pull away from Twitter for good.

Especially given that a lot of companies are already doing that- if not already preparing for it. Monster Hunter's official account is also on Bluesky now. A good chunk of celebrities are also starting to leave twitter for Bluesky as well. The amount of people is continuing to get larger and larger on the daily, and I feel like Twitter is slowly going to keep dying as a result. Hell, even companies are pulling ads from Twitter.

I think Twitter's days are numbered. People forget what the internet was like before the late '00s and the rise of Twitter/Facebook/Reddit. It used to be a far more volatile and I'd argue far more interesting landscape of sites. It didn't take much for something new to come along and drag people away

For a while I thought that internet had gone forever, and maybe it has in a way. But I'm beginning to think it's kinda still there it's just that there's more people so it takes more time for things to shift. I feel like Twitter and Facebook increasingly have the stink of MySpace about them. It's only a matter of time

But I don't see Nintendo leaving for a bit. Maybe they'll start posting elsewhere but I doubt they'll stop posting on Twitter. Not yet anyways

I feel like Facebook got around that issue by buying half of their main competitors — instagram, whatsapp, etc. Of course they also own threads which is currently the largest competitor to twitter. Also there are a lot of countries where facebook is the primary access point to the internet. I wouldn't quite say meta is 'too big to fail', but it's very near that territory. I think that type of thing is the primary difference between now and the early internet — more people, yeah, but also with correspondingly massively more entrenched and powerful companies. And yeah someone could quibble about Facebook versus meta, but I choose not to.

Don't get me wrong, Twitter is definitely not in meta range of power and could die much more easily, although not at all easily still.

In this amount of time Bluesky is actually outpacing Threads in growth. I genuinely feel like it’s shaping up to be the larger competitor.