NEStalgia

@johnvboy IDK about that visually. It's not simply about appealing to kids that watch the anime. Compare what Game Freak created here to what Level 5 did 4 years ago with not even a fraction of the available budget, for Switch with Yoaki Watch 4, ostensibly the same target demographic as Pokemon, literally. Level 5 just has better artists and designers, though not the better game designers or business managers....

@johnvboy Switch has it's issues in terms of graphics, but Game Freak in particular is just.....not very good at graphics. They managed to abuse the 3DS badly, as well. X/Y was a slideshow at times. And they never fixed it. How the best funded studio on earth can be the worst at optimizing graphically simplistic games, I will never know. These guys have cash that makes CoD money look like a budget indie.

A relatively minor chip upgrade is all it was ever going to be (again, DSi, N3DS, etc.) Nothing really promoted as a "faster" system with a different level of graphics (even though N3DS actually was that), but I do believe it was supposed to have happened. Though you're right, they got a good deal from nvidia and the beancounters were going to use that for all its worth.

To be clear, I don't think OLED would have been officially marketed any different than it's currently being marketed, but I do expect it would quietly have been better on the inside by the original design. And that's consistent with how Japanese companies generally operate.

@zool Perhaps, so, but that's not necessarily the mainstream market, and whether or not that business model would work for Nintendo isn't going to make them change their business model on the current platform half-way through. They may very well do that with the next platform. But not the current one. Plus the moving target for software creates some problems in the pipeline for testing and the like that Nintendo (which owns two testing companies) may not find cost effective for their processes.) If they could make lots of money on hardware as Apple and Samsung does, that would make more sense. If they're not making much profit on hardware, that model wouldn't benefit them at all.

I'm positive there will be Switch 2 or Switch Go, or Switch something. But like Game Boy, they won't stick with that brand or lineup forever. Otherwise Switch would be called Game Boy HD. Stagnancy would easily kill a company like Nintendo, so they have to keep reinventing. But I think we've got another 10 years of the "Switch" brand at least.

@johnvboy Game Freak and "impressive" are words I'd never use in the same paragraph. They've become their own FIFA factory for Pokemon games, but their games are 2 generations behind technologically, of course they can crank out games quickly. One can mock Switch's hardware prowess, but Game Freak's games are well behind what the main Nintendo studios are doing....honestly they're behind what Bamco does.... they're just a glorified indie studio with GTA level bank accounts

I do miss the days of more third party exclusives though. I think it's fair the publishers just don't want to make something they can't sell on every platform unless one platform pays them to do it. From a business sense it makes some sense (We all know Triangle Strategy will be on Steam and GamePass eventually, for example.) But that's what made DS and 3DS, especially, so special and is missing now. Honestly though I think the biggest part of it is the devs themselves. The publishers that don't suck want to let the studios create whatever they want to create and most game devs like to play with cutting edge technology and push the most dynamic and detailed art they can possibly push, and Switch just isn't the system that's going to do that. It was a fun curio and challenge for some at first, but it's just not what they want to do, partly because they want to play with the latest toys, and partly because they want to keep their resumes showcasing they're ahead of the curve and Switch isn't that. I'm not sure it's as much to do with companies not trusting the ability to sell on switch so much as creatives just not wanting to spend years working on it when they could be working with things that let them showcase more. I kinda miss the days when Japanese software companies did kind of design what was going to be made rather than letting the creatives decide. It sounds grand, but creatives are great at spending other people's money to satisfy their own amusement more than making a product everyone wants. Short of indies of course. Nintendo seems fine letting indies fill in for that kind of third party, but to me it falls short.

@zool Seriously, there's no new upgraded switch coming. It's just not going to happen. I do agree it WAS going to happen, but not any longer. The time window to make it viable has passed. Lite facelift first, agreed, but the next hardware after that will be the total system replacement, not just an incremental upgrade. Obviously I could be wrong, but realistically I think that's all but certainty at this point, just for commercial and market reasons. Nintendo at this point isn't going to do an annual new Switch, not after selling Switch for 5 years before an update. Maybe for Switch 2 they'll move to an annual pattern, but not for Switch 1.

@johnvboy With luck, you're right. I really, really don't want to sit through the preorder mess for a good long while. Though PSVR2 is this year.....sigh

I don't think the masses notice graphical issue, though Nintendo was sure convinced that the masses did care about fluid motion for many years, so I'm not unconvinced on that entirely, but the eShop, even the most casual player has internet shopped on a modern phone.....there's no way anyone can't notice the eShop is almost unusable horrid on the console. The slow eShop and OS performance with background apps/downloads was the main reason Iwata gave for the upgraded SoC on the N3DS, so that's one that at least in the past, that Nintendo has prioritized as mattering. Furukawa isn't Iwata, but you can't convince me they aren't aware that's not as it ought to be and probably would rather have improved that if it didn't present bigger challenges.

Modern big publisher games were always off the table, but I think the old gen port well is drying up now since it's limited mostly to 360 games, not PS4 games. Which is fine, if Nintendo can keep the exclusives going (honestly I'd prefer a Nintendo-driven lineup like 3DS, which I still hold had a better library pacing than Switch), but they've been pretty absentee for the past 2 years. It's really been up to random indies keeping the release schedule filled plus Capcom and Sega here and there.

I really don't think the OLED upgrade would not have included a modest performance improvement without a chip shortage. For a variety of reasons, not including newer hardware in a new release like that, and just throwing a new chassis onto an existing SKUs SoC just doesn't happen. Especially where a product price increase exists. Often it happens that the newer chips become cheaper to source than the older ones due to cheaper production lines/better yields/lower power draw or better TDP. If there was no OLED model with a new chassis at all, I would have agreed and said there probably never was a "pro" on the cards, but since they did produce the OLED with a whole new chassis and internals, I can guarantee you it was intended to have a new SoC that got scrapped. It wasn't going to be a "Pro" of course, just an updated SoC with improved clocks that wouldn't have even been in the marketing materials but would have enhanced the "feel" of the system. Even simple "Slim" cost-cutting models usually get an "accidentally" improved performance SoC, just by virtue of being a newer design with better thermals. OLED is a weird horizontal upgrade, and, while Nintendo definitely does weird as the norm, I don't think it would be the product it is in a normal manufacturing environment.

@johnvboy I'd love it if it were 2024/2025, though I'm still thinking 2023 for new hardware if they update the Lite this year to OLED, and assumes the Switch "Pro" was originally planned. 6 years would be quite long for mobile hardware (while providing years of still supporting Switch 1 as legacy hardware, though that didn't work out for 3DS, it died abruptly), Switch is showing weakness even for first party, which is probably costing them dev money/time, is almost as long a gen as 3DS/Wii (the latter of which overstayed its welcome), and longer than WiiU and GCN (which underperformed). I think it would have been 2024/2025 originally if they had released a "pro" model last year, but I'm putting my bet in that the original hardware upgrade idea was shelved with the idea of moving the successor date up in time to compensate the longer term dev plans.

Current Switch is in sort of an awkward place even for 1st party Nintendo games, that it's not weak enough to give them the ability to produce lower end more technically basic games like on 3DS, but is weak enough to hold back console game plans from using more modern dev tools/processes. No doubt that's been leading to a lot of the extreme delays in first party games. They're probably stuck between wanting to move on from that bottleneck and also maximize the current product's sales. Consumers may not care en-masse about 720p graphics, but devs, even first party, are probably not thrilled about being stuck with X360 era toolkits in 2022.

Then again it's the same Nintendo that let Wii float for years with literally nothing....though that hurt them big....they're hard to predict.

@zool It's pretty unlikely Nintendo would release the OLED and then a replacement for the OLED within a year of each other before they've even satisfied demand for the OLED model. That's just not smart business, and Nintendo isn't known for sloppy business. I do think an OLED Lite will be out by October or sooner, though, which is probably where the hardware rumors are coming from. It's unthinkable they wouldn't have an improved Lite model to match the regular model before a lot of big games release.

But at this stage of the game the improved performance hardware ship sailed, regardless of their initial intentions. They only way they'd upgrade it now is if they were planning on selling current Switch for many more years, and I expect the next console will be released between March and December 2023. That would give OLED 1.5-2 years which is really too short a span for new hardware, but seems likely. And that prediction assumes Lite OLED is this year.

@johnvboy Of course the crossover would then preset a new problem of having Animal Crossing breeding. I'm not sure if the internet would collapse or rejoice though....

For "Switch Pro", obviously the 4k PS4Pro in a slate rumors were always pure insanity. But I'm positive Nintendo intended to release a model with a chipset upgrade that could at least run the eShop in such a way it doesn't feel like online shopping in 1999 and hit stable framerates in so many games that currently lag, etc, and that it got scrubbed due to the chip shortage after which there's no future upgrade for Switch (other than probably Lite OLED.)

Nintendo hasn't made a handheld that they haven't upgraded chipset performance in an update (DSi, N3Ds, GBA SP), so a slight performance boost to cover the failings of the launch model is a Nintendo refresh staple that was missing this time, just using the original (or more power efficient Lite model version of it) stock. It's a shame, it was never going to be the "Pro" the internet fueled, but I think the Switch really deserved a "proper" final model to flesh out the rickety 2017 hardware. It'll never be what it could have been, now. For generations Nintendo games felt smoother and more fluid than other consoles because they were all doing 20-30fps cinematic games and Nintendo focused on 60fps. This gen it's now Nintendo games that feel creaky and choppy and the other consoles feel smooth and fluid. It feels wrong.

@johnvboy we need a crossover so I can use Bite in AC. IDK how effective it is but I know It's Super Therapeutic

@johnvboy I was hyped from the first trailer, but the more they showed, mixed with my own experiences with modern Game Freak, the more unsure I became, and I'm definitely taking a wait and see approach. Not only do all Pokemon games get a positive review bias when they launch because of the brand power, but it's more or less the first game Nintendo has even released of any real influence since ACNH (err....yeah..... ), so It's bound to get a positive review bias simply from being something worth reviewing from Nintendo for the first time in years. There tends to be a pattern with such Nintendo games that when they release everyone thinks they 're the best thing ever, then 6 months later they're the worst thing ever, then 6 months after that you know what people actually think about it.

Hopefully it holds up on gameplay over time (rather than the horrifically boring and empty Sw/Sh that burned me out on the series) because it sure doesn't have looks....

@Yorumi That's high praise so far! You're probably the most critical Pokemon fan I can think of (excluding the deranged trolls/haters.) and I don't have quite as high demands for the series that you do, so that bodes well.

@Dilly-Mick This is Nintendo Life. The subtitles are supposed to thrive on dank memes. Ask Kate! Or the whole Push Square staff! Excluding it on this is just wrong, and I blame the outside contributing author instead of the full-time staff that knows better

How could you write this review and fail the obvious "The greatest that ever was" subtitle? NintendoLife, you have failed us.

Good to see it review so well. It's not a day 1 for me, I've lost my faith in blindly trusting anything GameFreak does, and the graphics look like it's a PC game from the late 90's. But this is promising. We'll see if the honeymoon lasts a while longer. I'll use @Yorumi as a barometer for how much it's worth hating it. If it scores less than 6 out of 10 middle fingers, on the Yormi scale I'll have to buy it.

@rjejr I remember A Current Affair. Dang, that was the 80's? I don't remember it being that long ago. Seems like maybe 20 years ago. I vaguely remember it was Povich and his transition to gossip trash. I suppose if anything that proves that "news" and "gossip trash" are in fact the same thing, and that's not a post-internet phenomenon.....

My new goal in life is to be there when rjejr becomes a NY Republican. It'll be like the Hunger Games with a Switch! Personally I think the "parties" are just two different groups of hypocrites who just do the opposite of what the other does for no purpose but to spite each other at this point. It's like children that don't actually believe what they say, they just want to be on the opposite side of their parents and if that means convincing themselves they can breathe underwater, so be it. Neither side actually has a position they just take whatever position is the opposite of the other side's position even if the other side now agrees with what previously was their own position. As the old quote goes "I was for it before I was against it"

This has little to no effect on Nintendo immediately. The rise of cloud gaming and MS really putting all effort in to normalize it could eventually have substantial effect on Nintendo's handheld primary business though.

Beyond that, as others said, this will shake up the industry as a whole, inducing Sony and others to start buying studios, merging studios, or buying off exclusive content from studios, which may squeeze Nintendo out from studios they've traditionally relied on to feed their exclusive and semi-exclusive "second party" and "close partner" lineups.

@rjejr Isn't legalizing pot to deal with stupid like releasing rats to deal with the mouse problem?

Or is that what elections are? Can't remember.

Wow, Maury... There's a thing I haven't remembered or intentionally forgot for decades! Never thought he was worse than Springer though. Springer is just Howard Stern with less cool factor and a camera crew.

Archie.... We should have made him emperor. I know he's fictional. So are all our other leaders, so why not?

@rjejr I think I need to buy an NFT revolver to shoot my Meta-self with.

I truly cannot comprehend any of that dismal reality. Or how it could even come to be. I see any youtuber and think "how does this even exist? Who would even like this?" And then you see that people do and it's just....how? It's not even about young and old, it's now about completely illogical versus some shred of sanity. This isn't the result of "young minds" it's the result of what happens when 2 entire generations are raised in an imaginary world and then try to connect that to reality.

You could say "that's just crotchety old guy yelling at clouds" but the world is literally falling down around us.....hard to be proven wrong here....

@westman98 Very true, the in-person event had that. In that aspect the tradeshow/expo format in general (not just E3) has had a bit of a permanent decline for a long time just based on business expenses and other avenues of business. But that's certainly one aspect, and the least public-facing aspect of the show. Otherwise it was originally conceived as an expo for the industry to meet with retailers to line up their upcoming US holiday sales expectations with a retail industry that was still uneasy about video games, and a marketing too through the invited press to cover the upcoming holiday "toys."

I really enjoyed what there was of E3 last year. For where the industry is right now it was decent. Nintendo and MS had good shows. Squeenix was Squeenix. Sony's still alone in the corner. It would have been nicer to have more shows and events, but what was possible was good. Capcom's was the hardest one to watch.

@CharlieGirl So basically "I only like indie games therefore I don't care about E3, therefore it shouldn't exist?"

@rjejr Keighley is a glorified youtuber and nothing more. He can do what he does because he just sells his brand and gathers his following, without the baggage of being a large industry group pleasing its membership. But it also makes it more vacuous. He's just some schmuck putting on a show. ESA is the actual industry group, lobby arm, general PR wing of the whole industry, and all the members pay into it.

Bottom line remains E3 gave a set of days 1 week a year, scheduled, to tune in for an update from most gaming companies. It was something we could set our calendars to and all synchronize on what's coming in the future. Keighley's show and everyone else's individual streams, if there's 100 individual random events throughout the year, there may as well be zero. I'm not going to know about them, I'm not going to remember them, and I'm not going to piecemeal a calendar to track them all. That may reach the twitter kiddies just fine, but working folks can't just randomly tune in to dozens of random announcements the way a week of scheduled events works. If Keighley can make his event work over 3-5 days, great. If he drags it out over 12+ weeks again, he can get lost.

@CharlieGirl E3 was always a "AAA" advertising event. It was an industry tradeshow. That's it's actual purpose, always was.... The only difference was when it went from a closed show for retail/investement/media to a internet-televised fan festival. But it was always about the big companies promoting their biggest products.

A lot of us enjoyed the festival aspect and celebration of the games and platforms, though.

Even more than the question about why anyone would sell the likeness of a Youtuber is the bigger question. Why would anybody buy one for money? Like, can't you hit PrtScr on your keyboard for free if you really want to stare at Jim Sterling for long hours? Why would you exchange money for the privilege?

@westman98 "punchable face" = smug, obnoxious jerk just begging for a good punching.

Based on many of her reactions to him, I'm pretty sure Krysta would agree with that sentiment....

@Not_Soos nl should have had this in the article, but @oconnoclast mentioned the link earlier. Kit and Krysta apparently worked in the San Francisco satellite office NoA is closing and offering to consolidate to HQ in Redmond. Presumably Krysta isn't interested in moving to Redmond, so, that ended that.

Technically wasn't Krysta Kits boss? I can't remember her title, but I always thought she was so fake playing casual clueless perky fan girl when in reality she was some upper management marketing or PR manager and iirc above Kit.

But I always thought Kit was the most punchable face this side of Keighley. Very hard to watch. He needs a turtle neck and pink scarf.

Part of me has a gossip level curiosity about their history though. The mutual antagonism and disgust always looked like two people trying to with with an ex ... And one wanted to get back together and the other wanted to be in Antarctica if given the choice between those options. It made it amusing at times.

Much as I hated the fakeness of it, it reminds me of the Iwata Wiiu era.... I'll miss it...

Wait, so that site selling that Fire Emblem game where you have incestuous relationships with your siblings and awkwardly pet them was fake? I knew it!

I'm glad I pre-ordered my Switch Pro directly from nentendo.com.

4/10? I'm surprised it scored so high. Review reads like a 1.

Puyo Nights: NFT Online, Apple Arcade exclusive.

@Yorumi @TheRedComet Yeah, If you have a group of friends I could see how that would be fun (not my idea of fun, but I see how it could be.) But like Yorumi said, randoms...I mean, even if people weren't offensive jerks on the internet and were civil, I can't see it ending well to jump into someone's playground and start assigning roles, management teams, who's going to push the seesaw and who's going to dig where in the sandbox.... The idea of random people suddenly and instantly being told to join a vocal, talkative team effort sounds like a pitch for a reality TV show meant to laugh AT them, more than a fun way to spend a day

The problem with this idea is you don't know the real email address associated with a users account, you know only their userid. The only way you could block a user on Nintendo that you blocked on Xbox would be if Nintendo and Xbox were sharing user account data.....with the myriad of other data associated with the accounts (including the psych profiles, and the rest they're all quietly building on everyone)...that means collecting your identity across multiple environments in a central shared repository. For whatever seeming good that could do in terms of blocking jerks on the internet, the serious Big Brother harm that comes out of that kind of centralization of user information is nowhere close to the benefit.

A digital surveillance state in exchange to get obscenity hurling 12 year olds off your back in a video game really isn't worth it. The jerky 12 year olds can't actually harm you, they can merely call you names. The surveillance state can destroy you. You can leave the game. You cant escape the eternal data archive.

I think most of it has more to do with the type of people who are going to be attracted to playing online competitive video games with randoms with voice chat more than a specific lack of policing. It's sort of a built-in problem. Social, outgoing, friendly people are probably out doing social outgoing things, not sitting alone playing competitive video games online and voice chatting with strangers. I still firmly believe online gaming was best when there was no voice chat and you had to type anything you needed to say. I mostly left online gaming the moment I saw voice chat existing.

Cooperative games don't seem to have anywhere near the level of toxicity that competitive games do, and just look at the console wars for the nature of "competitive" people in the gamingverse.

I don't think it's an easily corrected problem, and I don't thing omniscient speech police solve the problem (and create lots of new ones.) It's like complaining a dive bar is filed with unsavory undesirables. Of course it is, who else would be in a dive bar?

I'm just grateful Splatoon has no voice chat and I'll stick with it until it does...

Just think, now Farmville equines will have properly animated testes....

Why would anyone pay over value for a half dead has been mobile company though? What asset do they offer 2k? And why is 2k suddenly trying to switch to mobile first?

Why does ComicCon exist? Surely everything at ComicCon happens year-round now. So why bother with the convention at all?

People lamenting that trailers happen all year really miss the point of these events. It's not just about seeing trailers and getting some news. It's having a unified all in one event that consolidates all that information, and has a sense of fun and immersion in the industry all at once. It's not the same as the industry trade show it once was, not the same as CES, but it doesn't need to be to be relevant.

@ThomasBW84 Where has it been confirmed that E3 is having a digital event at all this year?

Wow that's some cosmic prescience, there, Mr. Analyst. Nobody on the internet would ever have guessed that date!

Let's do a poll. When Nintendo announces switch 2, what percentage of NL will be surprised and upset that it's roughly the power of a base PS4, and what percentage will dig in and defend that as "not much weaker than a Series S" and complain about lazy devs not supporting switch 2 with AAA games day and date?

@DTFaux Ironically, if you look at the general sales habits on PS, in particular, I think used games sales (which was incorporated by GameStop, wrecking sales numbers, originally, and was named by the industry as the reason for going from $50-60 back in the PS360 era, and later the reason for day 1 DLC) takes a huge chunk of money from Sony in particular with their story driven one-and-done focus, and they're using the $70 pricing against the whales to make up for it (but it butchers digital pricing into absurdity), and to pad out the price decline across a longer duration with sales.

But I think what might be the nail in the coffin of the $70 model (even if they keep it 70 but just drop the prices faster) is how packed 2022 is going to be with releases. It's going to be major game after major game all competing at the same time, and they're all going to suffer in sales because of it. Not everyone can buy everything, and the pie is being split so many ways (For Sony, GT7, GoW2, HFW, plus who knows what else, along with the big games, from the annual series through Hogwarts, Elden Ring, and tons of other 3rd party heavy hitters that were delayed from prior years.) The market will cannibalize itself this year, and in that environment, I can't see high price tags holding long at all, unless Sony truly is going the Nintendo route of "The price is the price until 3045, buy it or don't."

@DTFaux True, to a point, though I suspect next time it'll be $5 for 10 plays. Look at what Halo is doing at $20 for cat ears for Master Chief Ariana.

We're arguing over $70 prices on games on the Sony side of the world, and meanwhile there's a market willing to pay $80 for a total puppy outfit for their space marine.

@BloodNinja LOL, if it's a post by me, you KNOW it's sarcastic

That's Arcade Bunny, from the 3DS title Nintendo Badge Arcade. Arguably the most predatory video game outside of mobile that pushed some very questionable boundaries before mtx was even standard in the industry. The cute fluffy Nintendo bunny that really really encourages kids to plug that credit card in. Often......

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Badge_Arcade

If predatory NFT can make money, Nintendo will be there on day 5 and retroactively charge for day -3.

@BloodNinja You totally missed the image attached to that post, didn't you?

@Yorumi Sure, some indies will continue the traditional model, but I fear it'll get to a point that that part of the market is really a niche, and not what most people consider gaming. It also doesn't necessarily consider the long term effect of subscription services like Game Pass and Sony's rumored upcoming sub, either encouraging mtx to make money from "cheap" game offerings, or staving off mtx by offering recurring payment up front (and arguably Game Pass already has a mostly indie focus anyway.)

Still, we've seen gaming devolving closer to gambling for years, and now I'm starting to see real gambling competing in gaming's turf, at least in mobile, and, really, making an even bigger marketing push. As gaming (especially mobile gaming) has been more and more designed to hit that gambling addiction center of the brain, and encourage continuous spending, without any chance of financial gain, it almost makes real gambling seem like the more value conscious activity since it comes with the chance of actual financial gain. Seeing actual casinos move into the mobile space in full force is both horrifying and, at the same time, having watched the game industry...feels completely natural. Why got to Vegas, when Vegas is always with you? Once iPimp comes out, Vegas might as well just get bulldozed and replaced with more mixed-use luxury apartment & office complexes.

Plus, in this case, we're talking about Sega-Sammy. The larger half of their company is literally a gambling machines company....

@BloodNinja That's ridiculous. Nintendo would never adopt predatory, morally bankrupt monetization practices like NFT.

@Yorumi Oh, I don't disagree, I've said in other threads (maybe on Push) that it's not like the Federal Reserve isn't must fake money printed out of thin air, either.

THEORETICALLY, the US dollar is based on some computation of the total GDP of the US or some such. Cynicism tells me it's probably as made up a number as the "inflation" and "cost of living" values that are based on weird and Orwellian factors, the price of luxury cars, and the cost of corn (not joking.) But on paper, at least, the USD is based on the theoretical total financial output of the US, while Bitcoin is based on how many teraflops a hundred SLI'd GTX Titans can process.

In practice the USD is based on whatever number of monopoly money the (privately owned) fed wants to print, and when you get deeper into it you realize just how corrupt the fiat currency system is and just why everyone is encouraged into becoming debt slaves (hint: Loans are not actually loaned money with interest....it's a writ to print new money, and the bank's money is merely held as escrow, not an underwrite. Every time someone takes a loan, new money is printed to underwrite the loan, and thus all other money is devalued. It makes me want to go all in on crypto, until I remember that's actually even worse.) I'd be very happy with bartering at this point. Very, very, very happy. Maybe we can barter on the blockchain....

@link3710 We're not talking about the publishers' corrupted NFT MTX systems, here though, we're talking about GameStop's attempt at using blockchain to attempt to re-establish their existing business model of buy & sell gaming content. I don't think anyone can look at what Ubi & Sega are trying to do and say there's any positive value in that. But I've said in many threads that the ONLY good thing "NFT" can be used for in gaming is the one thing none of the companies will do - apply physical ownership rights to digital content. And that's the one thing GameStop has a vested interest in doing here that makes it different.

It just happens that what's in GameStop's best interest in protecting the status quo business model their company has been based on (buy & sell game content at extortionate prices) until digital threatened it into extinction (forcing them to become an apparel chain that sells consoles) happens to align with consumer interest in securing physical ownership rights to digital licenses, and what legislators have failed to do (and should have done) for a long time in terms of digital commerce legislation.

They could pervert it. It's GameStop, they probably will pervert it. But it does present a singularly interesting disruption in the market possibly that I didn't see coming and would like to see happen.

@Dethmunk Optical disc/cartridges are basically DRM but on a personal level.

"DRM" itself isn't really a source of problems. Ownership of authentication is. Physical media contains otherwise copyable digital data, and the physical media contains the encrypted license validation. Same as a digital copy. The difference to how is you possessed ownership of the authentication token on the disc/cart, while for digital meda it's possessed by the platform holder, in the cloud, attached to your account. You have no access to it, and no way to transfer ownership. Instead of obtaining a product/license, you basically get "enabled access" on your account.

Used appropriately, blockchains can rewrite that history and apply the same rights to digital licenses as physical licenses. It's an object (physical or digital) in your possession, that has material value and can be transferred. Blockchain is designed for exactly that functionality, and is, to date, the only means of making digital licenses transferrable in the marketplace without a central, proprietary database managing traditional DRM.

BUT, up to now, nobody has suggested using blockchain in the digital marketplace in that way. It kills a cash cow publishers have. GameStop, built on trading licenses, has a vested interest in dragging tangible license ownership from physical to digital now that a mainstream tech exists to do it, which makes this interesting. In the current digital future, they have nothing to sell. In a blockchain license future, their business effectively continues unchanged from its heyday.

Actual cryptocurrency has a shaky future because almost all it's value is speculation in the valueless non-existent "mining" of non-existent money. The whole thing is just speculation and fake money now being assigned a real money value that could drop out at any minute. But the actual authentication tech of blockchain doesn't go down with shady currency. The authentication tech itself, used simply as a decentralized, open DRM platform, is just a distributed math platform that can guarantee unique keys.

That's separate from "game preservation" which of course, still relies on a central platform server to approve a digital token and license it, while physical doesn't. But it does solve a massive problem with what has been digital sales so far, in that even while current, they are non-transferable and hold no value, unlike their physical forebears.

I have a terrible feeling video gaming is going to become a heavily regulated industry and eventually merge with that other gaming industry, gambling. Since the rise of mobile and mtx whales, this stuff has become more built into the industry.

Starting this year while watching holiday TV programming I've noticed 10-15% of most TV advertising is now for mobile-based online casinos, advertising the variety of games available. Actual casino games. I have never seen this before. So we're now to the point (and with heavy mainstream marketing behind it) that the actual casinos are moving into the mobile gaming space as major players with actual gambling. While the video games industry moves ever closer to gambling-like monetization. It's really only a matter of time until video games and gambling wholly merge. The writing maybe should have been on the wall when Sega and Konami were making most of their money from gambling machines. Heck, maybe the writing should have been on the wall in the 80's when the dominant arcade chain was owned by one of the major alcohol & casino mfr/chains.

If GS is putting NFTs to use for the one and only ACTUAL practical application of assigning physical ownership rights to digital content, GameStop may be my new best friend.

While the publishers (and platform owners) want to double down on NFT for cosmetics and whales, and conveniently ignore the real function of blockchain to assign material trading of digital ownership, GameStop is presenting the idea of ACTUALLY using it to make digital licenses owned property. Which makes perfect sense, their entire business model is built on buying and selling used content. Digital guaranteed they had no future. NFT emerged, became a buzz word, and presented the chance to make digital tradable in their traditional business model and it benefits the consumer.

If they pull that off, they may change the nature of digital ownership in the marketplace, not just for games, but for music and video, for everyone, where legislators failed to do so for decades. If it works, it will also compel the platform holders to lower the price of games and accelerate the pacing of digital discounts to match physical.

With this particular approach, don't think of NFTs as "a new trap for whales" and think of "NFT" as a merging of physical and digital, or assigning video games as a form of cryptocurrency with actual value.

I can't imagine this not coming to Nintendo. If Banjo came to Nintendo, I can't imagine this not, the negotiations are already clearly well in place for that sort of thing. And I honestly can't imagine many XB players even on GP caring very much about this game. It's clear it's market is very much on Nintendo, and Nintendo alone. The game isn't actually very good in today's landscape, it's a nostalgia piece for N64 fans. MS would be throwing money away not putting it on Switch, and there's clearly no bureaucratic blocks preventing that kind of cooperation. The only viability to XB would be as a precursor to Perfect Dark, but even there, it's a weak connection.

Does Nintendo not hold the patent on optical sensors, rendering all of this drift stuff meaningless? But, of course, optical sensors cost more than $0.24 each, and you can't sell people $80 joycons every year that way.

@nessisonett "Mama mia! Here we a-go again!"
-Super Mario "Carl" Johnson

If GameFreak and 343i merged, we'd have half a functional studio.

It's great to see an interview on this game. It feels like the game basically released into a void and was never seen again. The marketing was so botched by the higher ups at square.

I don't imagine square will ever greenlight another sequel given the poor sales, but I like that the creators are still somewhat optimistic about a future for the series.

This series in some ways does what Persona tries to do better than Persona and SMT#FE do..... It's shameful it stays so under the radar while Atlus has, deservedly, built a hype machine.

That's pretty dire when the game of the year list is mostly a scrapbook of games of the past 15 years....

Other platforms just call that "BC"

Most played game on my Switch this year according to the stats. Great timing.

Do you know it wasn't until this thread i just got the word play on "Payne" and "Auchi"..... Lesser known is with some fancy wordplay "naruhodo" can mean "right".....Wright.....

I love the wordplay in these games....

@Gamer_Zeus sigh, and this is what we're talking about with Square being at fault for it's failure and their hideous marketing blunders.

This game isn't on mobile. At all. It's Switch, PS4, and PC. No mobile. It was the remaster of the original game that was on mobile (before it was remastered for console and PC based on the mobile and not the DS original.) This game, the sequel, NEO The World Ends with You was never on mobile.

But you're not the first, or the 100th person I've seen that thinks it's the same game, even on hardcore gaming sites....and if gamers don't know what game is what, the mass market certainly doesn't. That's how bad Square failed the marketing of this....

I'm genuinely surprised that a sequel would even be on the table given the sales disappointment this was. Happy, but surprised. The team may want to make another, but would Square even tolerate spending money on it, even if the previous failures were largely of their own making?