VinylCreep

@OstianOwl The original Thousand Year Door, at least with some publications, most notably Game Informer, actually came out and said they had to rate the Thousand Year Door low because they said they rate games based on their readership. They said Paper Mario was a "kiddie" game so they HAD to rate it low. That was kind of the mood at the time with Nintendo games. Game informer just had the gall to literally say it.

@Yoshif3 He's gotta go because he made Tears of the Kingdom? Uhhh... ok.

@Vexx234 What are you disagreeing with? Gabe's point isn't that delaying a game magically makes it a good game. He's saying when the choice is either releasing a game that has problems, or delaying it to fix it, then you should delay the game and fix it. Games that were delayed and wound up being bad games have nothing to do with his point here

Honestly, if Konami wind up making a brand new Metal Gear game they should just reboot the franchise kind of like James Gunn's version of the DCU. Don't try and replicate Kojima's vision, because you can't. He's an auteur. Find another hungry game designer and have them make their vision of Metal Gear, whether it's rebooting the same characters, or making their own characters with a thematic similarity to what Kojima did. That or think of it like the James Bond franchise. Either way, don't make Metal Gear Solid 6. Make a stark dividing line here and keep the Legacy series it's own thing.

I’m all for unions, but how would a union help in this situation? It seems like this company is just straight up going out of business. Isn’t a Union a solution to a completely separate issue? Or am I missing something?

Metroid shadow dropping and then doing well sales wise doesn’t mean it did well sales wise because of the shadow drop. It’s a basic correlation doesn’t imply causation principle and just general busted logic.

People are really just trying to yeet their worldview at people without really caring what people are even saying in here. After all the years of people doing that to each other you would think people would be aware of it at this point

@Bratwurst35 The problem is using that mindset as an excuse for doing nothing. And no one is trying to change the world in this thread. People are morphing it into that to justify their own worldview that hypocrisy is the only thing anyone is allowed to be outraged about. People in this thread are simply saying they’re uncomfortable with Saudi involvement in Nintendo. Caring about that or taking action doesn’t necessarily mean they’re on a crusade. You can extricate yourself from a problematic situation for more reasons than being on a crusade to fix the planet. And again… no one is even saying that in this thread.

@Savage_Joe You literally have no idea what anyone in this thread thinks about China and how they act upon it but you’re calling people hypocrites anyways.

@Savage_Joe that’s a total garbage opinion. You’re basically telling people that unless they basically drop out of society that they can’t care about anything. People literally can’t fight every single front in the world where things are morally questionable. People have to pick their battles. There are more options than care about everything or care about nothing. It’s ludicrous.

@WaffleRaptor01 people have these things called jobs that they need to get to. Not sure if you’re aware of that. Not everyone lives in a bikeable distance to their job and not everyone lives in areas with mass transport that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels. I don’t think you’ve thought this through too well. None of us can change the fact society uses vehicles. People can choose not to play video games. Are you going to tell people barely scraping by on minimum wage jobs trying to support their families, well, if you don’t want people in the Kotaku comments section to think ill of you you better upend your entire life and wind up going on welfare.

@SwitchForce if you want to boycott a video game company then you should boycott vehicles if you don’t want to be a hypocrite? You can’t seriously believe those two things are equally necessary components in society. People can’t avoid vehicles. People here are basically saying that if you don’t just drop out of society you’re a huge hypocrite for caring about absolutely anything

lol at all people trying to tell people not to care about countries that behead journalists and calling that virtue signaling. Some people are really dead inside.

@PinderSchloss The rights to Goldeneye were tied up between like 4 different companies. You obviously aren’t aware of all the work that went into this game being unraveled from that mess to get rereleased. It was certainly not something Nintendo could have released on day one. I mean it just got co-released by XBOX and Nintendo, that’s kind of your first hint that it’s not solely a Nintendo exclusive game right there. That and the fact James Bond isn’t a Nintendo character

@ottoecamn We don't know if there's more to it, but let's boycott anyways. That's really the bigger issue here.

@ottoecamn "Seeing the Tweets" is pretty meaningless when we don't know what the accumulated evidence is that made LRG fire this individual. It's simply what you know and what you have access to. You can't act like a jurist in this matter when it's just random chatter on the internet to go by.

@ottoecamn That's what was known about the incident, that someone made a complaint and then LRG made an investigation. Literally no one conversing about this topic knows what was in that investigation, they only know about Purple Tinker's instigation. No one knows the history of LRG and this employee, no one knows if LRG was aware of anything before this, no one knows what they discovered besides the parties involved. Everyone is taking what little info we have and making the most declarative statements and radical opinions people can make on the subject. It's absurd and a terrible way to formulate opinions on things, let alone using this as a call to action. Can you tell me who said LRG fired this employee simply because they followed people on Twitter? It's literally just "people on the internet." This employee following people on Twitter seems to have SOMETHING to do with it. Can anyone really say that's the only reason? You absolutely can not.

@ottoecamn It’s not confirmed anywhere that she was fired simply because she followed accounts. That’s a narrative out there based mostly on conjecture and unsubstantiated claims. I find it absurd people would form rock hard opinions about any of this without truly knowing the facts, so much so that they’re leading the charge for a boycott and to put a company with all their employees out of business. Makes you feel good I’m sure though.

@Askalt Nintendo owns the Astral Chain IP outright. They bought it from Platinum.

@calbeau That’s maybe one of the most naive things I’ve ever heard. Do you expect the entirety of the internet to behave on the honor system? When you have a platform this big you need proper regulations. This is 100% Twitter’s fault, and 100% Elon Musk’s fault considering it’s all a response to his haphazard changes

@Silly_G LRG aren’t developing games. They’re just packaging what developers make available. That’s something Konami has to make to have all of those games run off of one interface. That requires coding. LRG have no say or ability in combining games into one program like that

Can someone explain this math to me?

“It is worth bearing in mind that the term 'digital sales' does not refer only to games. The percentage accounts for all things bought digitally - downloadable versions of packaged software, download-only software, DLC, Nintendo Switch Online memberships etc. - and does therefore not wholly reflect the state of game sales alone.

Nintendo stated that sales increased for NSO memberships, DLC and download-only content to account for 47.5% of the company's total digital sales.

This being said, digital sales of otherwise packaged software continue to account for around half of game sales.“

So half of all game sales are digital, but then around half of that is actually NSO memberships and DLC (not digital versions of packages games). And somehow they’re saying digital versions of packaged games still make up half of Nintendo’s game sales? That doesn’t make sense. They just laid out how half of game sales are NSO and and DLC sales. It can’t be both. Their math indicates it’s like 25% unless I’m missing something?

@nessisonett

From the Polygon review:

“But if you ever wanted to believe that there was something deeper to Bayonetta’s story — some grander statement about femininity and sexuality and power dynamics — you’ll find the truth to be quite a disappointment.”

That is politics. Calling it what it is isn’t writing it off, it’s simply describing what it is

@Ganner What journalists took her side right away? I’m only aware of comment section people doing that.

@Bablommebite Both things can be true at the same time. We can say Hellena shouldn’t have distorted the truth and we can sympathize with her if she winds up getting death threats from random video game fans thinking they’re righteously taking up the cause for Platinum. People have become suicidal after receiving the full onslaught of Twitter. People are able to dole out admonishment but also be sympathetic to the person their admonishing. People lose their humanity quickly over stuff like this.

@Otoemetry People are quick to side with whatever tribe they identify with. People equally sided with Hellena because they blindly believe worker = hero, corporation = villain. People didn’t wait to look at the facts and come to an informed opinion. A lot of it was tribalism on both sides. We can’t say that didn’t occur on both ends of the spectrum.

@Otoemetry Right off the bat that doesn’t sound very concrete

@Otoemetry I’m not aware of Jennifer Hale being anti-vax. Even a cursory Google search doesn’t come back with any hits. You sure about that one? The only results I see are her asking if there’s any word on vaccinating children for Covid yet, presumably because she’s looking to vaccinate her child.

Honestly, as much as I think Hellena isn’t telling the full truth, I really hope she doesn’t get the full force of Twitter coming down on her. Almost no one deserves that! There’s no way she isn’t getting death threats and completely twisted harassing messages. Video game fans aren’t known for keeping things in perspective

@Tober All very true!

@Brett People just get locked into trying to prove something they tend to lose sight of the purpose of what they’re trying to prove. Even if you proved the 450 million figure under the parameters of: value = the net amount of dollars an IP made for absolutely everyone involved in touching the game, the figure is essentially meaningless. Even if the figure was accurate, it winds up being a lie when used as evidence they can pay Hellena more money, as it’s not the value of the franchise to Platinum themselves.

@nocdaes It’s not even the income of the franchise though. Income is what a company sees in net dollar figure coming back to THEM. If you multiply sales forecasts by the retail cost of the game you’re figuring Best Buy’s income, Amazon’s income, distribution companies income, etc, etc…. None of that money does Nintendo or Platinum, or their employees any good

@Wexter For context, Tencent bought a 40% stake in Epic Games for 300 million. That’s Epic, who make WAY more money than Platinum would in a million years. As an investment I’d rather own 40% in Epic at 300 million than full ownership of Bayonetta for 450 million.

@Wexter There’s no way anyone would pay 450 million for the Bayonetta IP when profits from the IP have never even accumulated that much money to date. That number might be what someone would buy Platinum for, but even that I’m not sure.

@nocdaes You keep making this effort to multiply sales figures with the price of the game to concoct the “value” of Bayonetta, but what real world purpose does knowing this number gain any of us? Hellena’s point was that it’s a 450 million dollar franchise, so of course pay me more! What value is this number when A, it’s probably wrong in the first place, and B, of that 450 million the vast majority of it is going to the cost of making the game, overhead, distribution costs, the fact Nintendo are wholesaling the game to 3rd parties, which in turn wholesale it to places like Amazon, Best Buy, and GameStop. The pool in which to pay employees isn’t even close to 450 million. In the end your number is completely meaning as a means to inform the conversation. It’s just bad accounting.

@RickRau5 Anonymous to us, not to the highly reputable journalist who broke the story and not anonymous to the two news organizations who verified the evidence. This is how journalism works, sir.

@Wexter Glad to see someone else broach the idea that Platinum “lying” about why Hellena didn’t reprise the role of Bayonetta was quite possibly because they respected her enough to do so. I can’t say I know for a fact that’s the reason, but given what’s come out now it certainly seems reasonable to think Platinum thought her behavior was embarrassing and didn’t want to out her to the public for behaving this way. Sometimes lying protects people. Like you say, it checks out with how they didn’t just drop her all together after her over the top demands, but they tried to still include her in the game before things broke down entirely.

@Otoemetry And there’s no way to tell how accurate Bloomberg’s “Switch Pro” reporting was. They reported developers had access to 4K dev kits and Nintendo balked at following through on a new console because of global chip shortages. There’s literally no way to verify any of that.

@Otoemetry It’s Jason Schreier’s reporting. There’s zero reason to think he didn’t do his due diligence on this. And if that’s your rationale to not believe a top notch reporter in this scene then you literally have a built in excuse to never believe any reporting ever.

@CharlieGirl But with everything that’s come out about voice actor pay, Helena’s pay was well above average at around 20k dollars for 4 sessions. If you add royalties, aren’t you essentially saying Helena would have been the highest (or at least one of the highest) paid voice actors in the business at that point? That being while Bayonetta is literally her only voice acting gig and it’s a game that’s only sold like 3 million copies between 2 games. That seems insane.

@Would_you_kindly That’s not a very scientific way to determine trust in a news source. By most accounts Bloomberg is a highly trusted source of information. There’s no real justification or motive for them to lie about any of this.

Just to make it clear. If Platinum were lying it means they literally forged documents. How likely is that?

@YoshiF2 when you say a game will make a certain amount of money it generally means profit, yes. Multiplying the cost of the game by sales figures is a completely useless number to inform the conversation. It actually provides more disinformation than actual information when framed like that.

@YoshiF2 You can’t just take 1.7 million sales and multiply it by $60 and say it’ll make over a hundred million dollars. That’s not how it works. Do you think GameStop sends all $60 straight to Nintendo’s bank account and then Nintendo has zero costs sunk into the game?

“The squirts of ‘liquid’ from that water pistol gun look rediculous. What is he doing, sweating from that gun???”

It’s hilarious to me that whoever at Acclaim that wrote this didn’t know how to spell ridiculous, and also just sounds like a modern day comment section dweller.

I mean, it’s clearly not the one that sounds stupid when you say it

How is no one calling it Fitness of the North Star?

@duffmmann A, you need gas to traverse the planet, it’s the unbreakable system we live in. B, no one needs NEO Geo Pocket Color 2. Equating both of those together is beyond absurd.

@Zebetite I’m sorry, the video game industry is tied to sleazy elements? Can you name me a video game publisher that’s murdered journalists before? What on earth are you even talking about? And yes, video game publishers murdering journalists is my breaking point where I don’t want to buy their product any more. Call me old fashioned I guess.

I guess maybe I’m able to do some mental gymnastics to be alright with myself for buying products from some pretty big *****, but there’s no way I’m ever going to buy an SNK product again after the sale of the company to Jamal Khashoggi‘s murderer. It’s hardly worth it. Have fun though.