Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@NEStalgia I'd imagine it's because the XB1 doesn't have anywhere near the volume of exclusives the Switch does. Why pay to get more timed exclusives when you're already soaring above your competitor in terms of actual exclusives.

@NEStalgia
While games like FFX and XII never came to GC, Wii, Wii U, Xbox or 360, I feel like maybe there were reasons. Leaving Nintendo the gen prior to GC, Xbox being new, then 360 not selling in Japan, and Wii being underpowered, then U failing, etc etc

But then you look at games such as FFVII and IX and it makes no sense. VC was thriving on Wii, Wii U and 3DS.

So ya, something else was going on for sure. Maybe some of it was just, no solid alternative until now. But that definitely isn't the whole story.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_dealing
Seems to be illegal in US, EU and a host of other countries. I don't think Sony would want to risk that.

Lol I always enjoy the conspiracy theories

Are people still believing that Sony and/or Microsoft are deliberately paying off developers and publishers to delay games on the Switch? It's like people have gone super paranoid now Nintendo has a big success on their hands.

@FragRed Um... yes? Not every game of course, most have other reasons. But publishers paying for timed exclusives is a fact about the industry. Anyone remember when Microsoft paid to keep Rise of the Tomb Raider an exclusive for a few months?

https://www.polygon.com/2015/8/5/9104411/rise-of-the-tomb-rai...

Timed exclusives are well documented facts. Now, whether Spyro is one or not is quite questionable, I'll give you that, the only reason it seems likely is the number of industry leaks indicating it is. It's a weird one, that's for sure.

Sony does it as well, with multiple publicly documented cases in recent memory:
https://www.fraghero.com/mans-sky-timed-exclusive-ps4/

And Nintendo of course paid for full exclusivity of Octopath Traveler, why do you think they ended up publishing it?

Then you have titles like Nier Automata that were originally targeting only PC and somehow ended up on PS4 first, with PC and XB1 getting delayed releases. I'm not saying every game that misses a system is part of a deal, but if you don't think there's a couple backdoor deals regarding timed exclusivity going on each year between ALL the companies, you're mistaken.

@Therad Funny, rebates were illegal too. Didn't stop Rockefeller. Burning down competing refineries in the middle of the night when they refuse to sell to you is also illegal. Yet Rockefeller never did time. Amazing what happens when you can plausibly deny involvement, leave no paper trail, and own the law.

As I said to someone else in another thread about another topic, "It's only illegal if you get caught" is the motto here and business at large. Like with trust cases the odds of getting caught are amazingly low, proving it's true is near impossible if the involved parties are both interested in keeping it quiet, and even if you do get caught there's a million loopholes and gyrations of plausible deniability baked into all these deals to the point that "it's illegal" is a fancy way of saying "it's legal if you do it this way, and include that clause."

Illegal backroom dealings is pretty much standard operation for day to day business in most companies worldwide. Of course it's never illegal. Page 1347 subsection c article 2 clearly has a clause in the past tense indicating that it is indeed not an illegal exclusive dealing at all!

Sure, decent folk don't behave that way. Unfortunately decent folk rarely climb the ladders of success to corporate or governmental leadership roles. In fact they're all but precluded from the role. Two executives handshaking a deal over dinner isn't exactly something that can be tried in a court. Thus it happens on a daily basis throughout all business. And it doesn't really matter if it's legal or not. It only sees the light of day if one of the parties reneges on the deal.

@FragRed No, it's not a Nintendo thing. It's a business world at large thing. In this particular instance it just involves Nintendo.

Edit, and also the joy of modern corporate law is, even in the very unlikely chance you do get caught, all the individuals plead innocence, the company pays the $500M fine with cash out of the dividends drawer for 6 months, and keeps on going on doing whatever they were doing before while making grandiose PR noises about how they've installed a new ethics panel to ensure the integrity of their enduring relationship with their valuable consumers.

@NEStalgia Businesses are becoming too big and too powerful with every day that passes. The bigger they are, the more dodgy they become. Rather sad world we live in.

@FragRed Indeed. When most of the western rules for businesses were designed it was designed for small scale businesses, mom & pop shops, maybe regional powerhouses at biggest. And a few with large reach but plenty of regional competition. Modern "business" however looks more like planetary feudal Houses, at best, with a reach beyond what most but the largest, most prominent governments had in the past. And more worryingly, cabals of said Houses really wield the control of those prominent governments completely, not far from the intrigue of old royal courts that were really controlled by a cabal of noble Houses.

Which, of course, when you go back and read a bit on the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, etc, is precisely what they were hoping to achieve.

@NEStalgia Just a couple of days ago Comcast and Fox (backed by Disney) went into a blind auction to buy out Sky Plc, a satellite and internet company here in the UK with roughly 23 million customers. Comcast won by bidding over £30 billion. It's scary just how much bigger that would make the company and how much power it gives them over what people watch, and I don't mean just normal programming but in particular news which can be manipulated to justify a particular political agenda.

I hope that Nintendo starts to look into doing some kind of deals themselves if it means keeping them in the game regarding third party support. Late games aren't good for the system in terms of sales, and aside from the odd exclusive such as Octopath Traveller (something tells me any sequel won't be exclusive), they need to do more.

@link3710 Paying for exclusivity is different from paying to keep it off one system though.

@FragRed Indeed. The consolidation of media on that scale of Disney and Comcast used to be illegal here in the States not so very long ago. Then they rolled back nearly all the media consolidation laws, turned a blind eye to the ones that were still illegal, and kept taking money from the companies. The beauty of the all powerful corporation. You don't need to worry about the laws. When you can afford to buy a politician, you're the one that writes the laws. That's what was the travesty about the "Net Neutrality" farce. That wasn't about neutrality. That was about content companies using government as a kudgel against telecom to do their bidding, while telecom previously used government as a kudgel against media. But the legislation itself was written, not by legislators, but like most modern legislation is written by corporate legal teams, and their "non-profit think tanks of industry affiliates" and submitted to their owned politician to submit as legislation. People act like it was government protecting the people from Comcast. No, it was the government carrying out Google/Facebook/Netflix/Apple's written policy to apply to a country for their own benefit. Now we see the other half of that with all media consolidating down to a few. The way of the modern world. Any function in society needs no more than a duopoly controlling it, and all excess human functionality can be cut from the equation to maximize efficiency.

Gorbechev rightly ascertained that the illusion of choice between two controlled options of the same organization is enough to placate the populations frustrations. Thus the CCCP would offer two candidates from the Communist party to vote between. People felt contented now that they had a choice of leaders, despite both being ranking officials of the same party as chosen by the current party leaders. It was "enough." that thinking is now applied to all things, from politics, to business. The illusion of choice between two options controlled by the same organization is enough to content the masses, indefinitely, in all things, apparently.

As for Nintendo, acquisitions cost a lot of debt. If you're making aquisitions but not controlling a market almost wholly these days, you're weakening rather than strengthening your sovereignty. For Nintendo, their mammoth cash reserve is the only thing keeping them from being bought out. They're a very expensive target where the cost to acquire is actually greater than the asset value, you're just buying cash in equal amounts. That creates an island for them that protects them. Nobody buys a currency reserve for cash value. Spending that money for acquisitions that don't form a pseudo monopoly would actually be worse for their long term survival and independence.

@Octane Certainly. The latter is cheaper than the former, and achieves the desired goal in more targeted fashion

@NEStalgia The problem Nintendo faces, is that as Sony and Microsoft buy into the exclusives market and the buying out of independent developers to bolster their own first party companies, this leaves Nintendo in a position where they are solely reliant on what little internal teams they have. They have already discovered how difficult and timely it is to develop HD games and they have not even reached current generation levels of hardware power as of yet.

As a company, Nintendo has for better or worse, relied on their own first party games to keep their systems selling. However, in the past prior to creating for HD, they were in a position to pump out games at a much greater level than they are now - hence one reason for merging all their teams. So if Nintendo is to survive, they really need to look at investing some of that huge pile of money sooner rather than later, especially as they can no longer guarantee each system release to be a big success as has been proven multiple times. And there are only so many failures you can take before you end up like Sega no matter how much of a Ducktales Money Pit you may have.

@subpopz Best avoid what is likely to come from

Those who preordered VC4 digitally will get it (or have got it) at midnight.

It's not conspiracy theories. It's been happening over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It was happening between Sony and Microsoft before Switch was even a thing. Not only was it happening and is still happening, it's quite common practice. The name of the game is getting people to buy your console instead of the competitors. The number one way you do that is get games on your system that your competitors do not have.

And you mean to tell me you actually believe that they do not exchange money to ensure their rivals do not get a game they get? Are people really this ignorant to how business works in free markets? No offense, honestly, I like everyone here, but let's not be ignorant about the world and how it works. I think some people just have a really hard time accepting that Sony does scummy crap like that.

You think Activision decided to put Crash on PS4 and no other systems because they are high school buddies? Do you think Spyro didn't get announced for Switch and PC because Crash did poorly on those systems, those systems that got the game after the rumored and leaked exclusivity period? Try again. You think Castlevania not getting announced for any other console until PS4 releases (watch and see it play out exactly as the leak indicates, then watch as people try to deny the validity of the leak's claim of a deal being struck) is because Konami thinks they can't make money on other systems? Yet then releasing on other systems afterwards?

Remember the leak about Monster Hunter that predicted the game well before it was ever announced, that said Sony had worked out a deal to keep it off other systems, and then we saw with our own eyes that it was exclusive in Japan which just confirmed what the leak had said to begin with, and notice how despite the game clearly running on Win 2 without any real optimization and the fact MH games sell 4-5 million copies on Nintendo platforms, probably well more than that if it was a AAA title, and yet they strangely seem to not want to port the game even when developers like Adam Boyd are literally offering to do it for them... that seems very strange indeed, until you remember the leak about them making a deal, and if part of the deal was the game cannot come to any handheld platforms (as an excuse to keep it away from a platform that would rock them pound for pound in sales and brand identity), if that was the understanding then it all of a sudden makes perfect sense. After all, we know a deal was made because it was exclusive in Japan, and the leak told us a deal was made before the game was ever even announced which proves the leak was real.

Those blindly loyal to Sony will deny it and continue to shrug it off as nothing more than tinfoil hat conspiracies, meanwhile, everyone else is well aware of their policy to pay for exclusives in order to prevent those games from releasing on other systems. You don't have to like that truth, but it's just a reality of how they operate. Street Fighter 5, another example. And please don't try to tell me Capcom couldn't afford to make a new SF game, which until recently was their biggest heavy hitter in their entire portfolio. Really expect people to believe that? So they'll make games that sell half a million copies but they won't bank roll their biggest hitter? They might agree to sugar coat it to journalists to avoid angering the community, but one must be careful to not be so gullible as to believe carefully marketed propaganda. Critical thinking will quickly reveal that for what it really is.

This is just a reality of capitalist markets. All three companies engage in these practices and anyone claiming otherwise is simply out of touch with the real world. The only difference is, Sony does it noticeably more than anyone else, at least nowadays, and that's saying quite a lot given how bad Microsoft was for a while, given they didn't really have many exclusives of their own. It seems like every month there's a new rumor or a leak about another game Sony has worked out a deal for. How often do you hear leaks about Nintendo doing that, and not a legitimately bankrolled franchise that was only picked up after being shunned by everyone else first (Bayonetta, Devils Third). Not often. There's only a couple examples I can think of, and one of those is simply working out a deal for an exclusive physical retail version of a game.

A conspiracy theory would be somebody who claims that Sony is secretly planning to take over the world and assassinate the president of Nintendo and then they're going to pay off government to allow them to monopolize the market... that's a baseless conspiracy theory. Watching a company work out exclusivity deals, then stating as much, is much more a statement of observable facts than it is a conspiracy.

People criticize Nintendo all day long for things they are deserving of criticism for here. Their crap voice chat solutions and lack of messaging and complete refusal to give us basic apps and organization options... people have no problem pointing out when Nintendo does stuff that pisses people off. And we are actually on a Nintendo site. Yet when somebody points out one thing, just once in a while, that they don't like which Sony does, it gets labeled as "conspiracies from paranoid nut jobs on the Internet". No. Sony is one of the scummiest companies when it comes to cockblocking games. There are a lot of things companies do that I overlook or shrug off, but cockblocking games as a matter of policy is something that I personally take offense to because what they are essentially doing is giving me, you, and everyone else the middle finger. Just like locking Fortnite accounts from use on Switch for even being associated with their platforms. They don't care if they screw over gamers who own other platforms. That's the running theme. So I will not hesitate to call them on it. Doesn't mean I'm boycotting them or that I don't enjoy their products or that I think everyone who works there is evil. It just means they engage in the practice of paying for exclusivity as a means to prevent other platforms from getting games, either at all or until their version releases, far too often. And people should step up and say something about that, just like people should step up and say something when Nintendo releases subpar online.

Anyways

Reminder that Dragonball Fighter Z drops Friday. Haven't really heard anyone talking about it. The game is sitting at an 87% on Metacritic I think. So it's reviewed extremely well.

Posted this in the DBFZ forum, but I'll drop it here as well:

checks in on thread
...What did y’all do?? The number of words in these posts is too darn high.
Anyone heard word on when Grom Fandango is finally hitting?

@DarthNocturnal
They've got too much clout. They might make a one time exception, but that's all it will be is a one time exception. Unless enough developers band together and force the ultimatum en masse, they're not gonna back down. And that sucks because a lot of people do own PS4 and I want to play with them. They might even get another year sub from me if they allowed cross play. I've got a guy at work, huge Skyrim fan, that I would love to play with. But I'm not buying a second copy just to play with him.

But let's not put it all on Sony. Part of the reason they've been able to get away with it is because a lot of developers still aren't incorporating cross play when they should. If every single game had cross play between Switch and Xbox and PC, the pressure would be enormous. At the same time, if they played ball, more developers might be inclined to prioritize it. Cross play across all 3 consoles and PC needs to become a universal standard asap.

@DarthNocturnal
Forgot about it being F2P, but not sure if being F2P changes anything.

It's a game you're going to invest money in one way or the other. I'm not a person that's going to only play for free. Investing in two different copies just doesn't make sense.

How bout that DB Fighter Z though? How bout that Valkyria Chronicles 4 though? It's release week. Where's the excitement?!

Right now on the US EShop DBFighterZ is at #47 and VC Chronicles is at #79