YAT

@nessisonett Yeah. This is pretty terrible, with not many signs of it improving any time soon. Nothing interesting or smart done in any of the recent games. Just anime pulp junk.

@GrailUK If value for money is subjective, then that consideration should be built into a system that benefits consumers at the corporate pricing stage, not the consumer level.

You do not set an infinite ceiling based on something you cannot measure that others might find "fun." The value for the content of the work comparative to similar works or past works in the market as a value/proportion of average consumer resources is not subjective.

@FlyingDunsparce Nintendo is literally pricing their games based on their own self-determined content proportion policy.

The days of price stability making cost a non-factor are dead. I want every review to mention if the price matches the purported content pricing that I'm paying that Nintendo thinks is accurate.

Here's hoping this one has a spine for NoA customers and a vision for something besides bankroll once they get a position to do so, unlike the completely invisible foot rug that was Doug Bowser.

@Bunkerneath This argument is always terrible. The fact that the industry stabilized the pricing for consumers was a good thing that helped it grow. It also made it good to experiment for devs, good for entry level consumers like children to be involved, and good for buying consistency. High prices lead to fragility in the market which marked a massive downturn in consumer confidence, business relations, and product quality for every company in the latter half of the decade.

Games having variable pricing and ridiculous price points in the 90s was due to a lack of consumer protections, with company's setting their own price points based on individual company speculation of how much they thought the could get, not the value provided, or any sort of baseline from which a buyer would benefit. It also had to do with a much less streamlined production line, with marketing and manufacturing being, largely, outside production. That has changed. This is the same kind of anti-consumer speculation today, driven by the F2P market bubble.

It's a childish comparison to show the industry during its infancy; an inflated, speculative bubble, and say that its somehow normal to be experiencing the same price atmosphere today, when the consumer base has grown by an order of magnitude of hundreds of millions, and is more stable than its ever been. It's a last-resort whataboutism argument that helps nobody. No offense to you, we all like Nintendo games as a creative medium, but the business side is, and always will be, anti-consumer (i.e., you), when they see a potential market cornered. No sense defending it, but instead learning and calling it out.

Abused contractors losing their jobs for a cheap alternative, who could've seen this coming in the Age of Greed. Doug Bowser sucks and all the legacy players at NoA have no backbone. Just lapdogs for the NoJ C-suite now.

@Suketoudara Nah. Technical performance in gaming will always be important to understand, and being able to identify and analyze good and bad practices is invaluable for devs. Informing consumers as well in the industry as a whole, who often view games as magic and don't have the knowledge to know what's what, is a service we need more of.

They seem super passionate and try their best to be informed and to inform the public about the technical side of gaming. We should all strive to be more informed and less blindly consumerist about the products we use.

@KevinP Nope. They're now firmly in their anti-consumer era, not even putting on the airs.

Lifelong card-carrying company simp justifies the exploitative work environment he helped shape that made him rich to say something vaguely corporate in service of nobody but the company, what a surprise

@piyuv
Seriously. Why do so many Nintendo-focused writers try to live in an alternate reality from the rest of the world?

This absolutely sucks, nobody should defend it. It is just anti-user. There's no reason for this to exist. CRITICIZE THIS COMPANY WHEN THEY'RE WRONG.

@PessitheMystic I believe it's many different people thinking the same thing, just expressing the truth of it.

Like how the Switch 2 version of Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma will cost $69.99, but the PC version will cost $59. Kinda odd, isn't it? Pretty sure the PC version will have framerate, resolution options beyond the Switch 2 version, as most PC games do. Almost like it's a pretty blatant anti-consumer practice and a lot of people are upset!

@SintasSays Equating asking for better consumer consideration, communication and respect regarding an unannounced $20 increase in product pricing from a multi-billion dollar company to some right-wing culture grifters is a helluva hoop to jump through.

@Saints Bravo. A fantastically elucidated position, one that stands head above the rest.

Many keyboard economists and market valuations in this comments section, many of which are postured to be resistive to criticism, not adding to any substantive discourse, but simply defending a limited opinion based on facts they don't have about the economic inner workings of the company. It is crystal clear at this point-- what Nintendo has shown is a bad pricing model that has fostered a lot of negative customer sentiment, even in isolated communities like this one. They have also done an even worse job communicating their position or their logic in their decision-making. The VP and president both directed consumers who were dissatisfied with the pricing logic of an $80 game toward a complete mystery Direct nearly two weeks away, that was only revealed to be 15 minutes long right before it went live, and had substantively less information than both the initial reveal and the Treehouse segment. It was purely a deflection tactic from corporate NoA, who had no intention or ability to answer for those legitimate pricing criticisms. I believe current leadership at the company as a whole is quite weak on consumer priority compared to previous leadership, leading to this situation buildup from the last two generations.

Businesses that are based on products of subjective content - - creative endeavors, necessarily take the metric of consumer investment & opinion metrics much more seriously than those that are not reliant on the subjective(who also value those statistics considerably, since the world revolves around people and not money, believe it or not); not what econ teachers or analysts think, because customer sentiment is a longer term goal that produces a more stable and reliable benchmark of company health that can drive decision-making than any one economic stat could produce. No company thinking of the long term benefit of consumer/product relationship evaluates their products based on a position of pure capital. That is something so brittle, that it's just silly to even consider. If the company isn't thinking of long-term benefit as a mutual or two-way interaction in a way that is consumer-centric, they deserve every criticism given.

Criticizing anti-consumer practices and fighting for the standard that you believe in should be a staple of every community. There is no growth for the company or the consumer position from blindly accepting their corporate position at face value, given their recently quiet poor regard for what consumers value, especially given consumer lawsuits and complaints regarding poor hardware quality and lack of basic functionality/quality control in some of their key products & franchises. I believe much of the sentiment we see now about pricing and product strategy wouldn't be half-as-strong had they addressed any of the growing number of issues here and elsewhere with some deftness and humility. I see them overall as a good and necessary originality in the world. I think everyone can agree that we would like to see them do more to be a little more like themselves than we've seen of them recently.

There is no growth in believing that a company should or could be purely profit-motivated, and still have consumer's best interest in mind. That is a time-tried and true fallacy. A company as large as Nintendo does not benefit from critical isolation.

@Medic_alert

The reason why it's "throw the baby out with the bathwater" is because companies will inevitably want throw the artist out first, if they believe the baby can be more cost-effective and the bathwater is cheaper to create and manage than hiring and training artists. Plus, there will be companies dedicated to providing ai services as databases to fill in those gaps and try to make a dollar pushing people out of that role, as their business niche.

It's a tool for utilization, like lots of new tech, but we're approaching some philosophical levels of these tools that matter beyond doing simple arithmetic. Do we, as a human audience, value the impact an individual artist's vision, ideology, and intention in the creation of a piece of media, over simply visual output, over increased productivity? Do individual human endeavors and ideas crafted into our experiences matter more than a homogenized recreation? And who all benefits from that? Who is paid for developing this product that used a homogenized recreation? That uses artists' works to make something in mimicry? The artists? The ai business? The developers?

So much work needs to be done to find better solutions to utilization and make it a viable tool for everybody involved, from the development and training of ai, to how and where it makes sense to implement it and who controls the output. With ethics, energy costs, with almost every aspect to it. In my own subjective experience, art is about perspective and what draws me to works is about uncovering that human connection, finding the little touches and flaws is something worth as much if not more than the experiences are as a whole. That's what I want from books, from games, from movies. I'm not really interested in something wholly created without that ethos guiding.

@Splash_Woman Yeah, I felt like it was a terrible co-op experience when it came out for that exact reason. They aren't thoughtful about their mechanics at all.

@swoose Yes, exactly. If it's a handheld, why would we need 4k resolution? It sounds more like they want 3rd parties and they'll use bad post-processing upscaling and have the console with the weakest ports and worst looking games again.

I doubt we'll see much of it in 1st party titles, unless they've completely lost their minds. Ghosting, smearing, and frame lag in a Mario game will be my last Mario game.

@batmanbud2

Chill, Gamer. There's a lot to hate, but there's a lot to love.

All this says is more people playing games, and Pokemon is popular. The team has been struggling with the shuffling of key Pokemon creators phasing out of active development the last decade. They'll find their legs again.