1. Nintendo keeping a tight rein pre-launch, to avoid having everything leaked years in advance. Meaning only those parties Nintendo trusted 99% not to blab constantly.
2. Simple supply and demand. Coming off the success of the Switch 1, every developer on the planet wants a devkit, and if they have one already they likely want more. However many devkits they produce per month, its not going to be enough anytime soon.
Easy: Its not some magic malign malware. Its a firmware update. Some unlicensed accessories react badly to it, and some don't. Because part of being "unlicensed" is that they had to engineered their own compatible design, and different companies come up with different solutions.
A solid list of quality candidates. My only gripe is that Clair Obscur absolutely does not belong on this list: Sandfall is a small studio, but if a studio with 50+ employees counts as "indie" than so does a uselessly-broad swath of the industry. Might as well nominate the Trails in the Sky Remake.
Will it increase sales a substantial amount, such as to fundamentally change the market situation? I highly doubt it. Its not like you'd be looking at a price drop from $500 to $100- the PS5 is still going to be an expensive investment in hardware, not an impulse buy. And pricing won't change the "size" and "library" problems. If Sony really wanted to improve their situation in Japan, they'd be better off spending money making and marketing games that appeal to the Japanese audience. However, that would require actual effort, as opposed to the comparatively cheap cost of hacking together a region-locked SKU.
You know. . . has anyone considered the potential scenario "There is no 60 FPS mode, and never will be"? Just because there is code related to such in the release game, doesn't mean there's the intent to turn that into a finished feature. It could just as easily be the remnant of a proposed feature that has since been abandoned, or perhaps soft-abandoned in the "no current plans, maybe we'll do something with it sometime" sense.
Yeah, but that would require Sony to actually invest in making games other than giant GAAS moonshots and prestige VGA-bait titles. And Sony seems to hate doing that ( probably because nobody inside Sony gets rewarded for doing bread-and-butter work ).
Citation needed. Note, "banning consoles for using pirated/ripped games" is not bricking. The consoles still function just fine, they simply aren't allowed onto Nintendo's networks anymore.
This, as I understand it. Its less about the region locking and more the language locking. Which makes sense: Nintendo isn't trying to control sales of games by region; they are trying to keep their home region from being drained of hardware by export shenanigans.
My only complaint about the remaster is the difficulty spike with the final dungeon. It was otherwise surprisingly accessible for a SaGa game, and kind of felt like they crammed an entire choice-and-consequence WRPG into the FF6 engine.
I'm almost certain the issue isn't about "justifying the budget". Its about "guaranteeing release dates". The Pokemon games are part of the larger Pokemon Marketing Machine, and so have to come out at the designated time for crossmarketing purposes. Thus, everything has to be built around "the game can never ever be delayed", because missing out on a release slot could cost extremely large amounts in total revenue from reduced sales of everything else.
This. I am extremely sympathetic towards the desire for difficulty settings, but this isn't like a Souls game where you could do an easy mode by all of "reduce enemy damage by 10%" or the like. Damage is too granular for that work all that well, and most of the real difficulty is platforming anyway, IMO.
So. . . no, I'm not going to say that people who want a difficulty selector are "wrong" or "bad". I would however suggest that anyone calling for such should specify exactly what changes they want, rather than some vague non-specific "difficulty selector".
Simple answer: Because your premise, that the Switch 2 is "just a Switch 1 XL", is false.
Longer answer: Because backward compatibility is not magic. How well it works depends on the technical details of how its implemented, which depends on what you are trying to be BC towards. The only way to get 100% backward compatibility is by effectively including a copy of the same hardware in the new device. The Switch 2 does not do that, because it would be wildly impractical; it instead uses a "compatibility layer" to convert those portions of Switch 1 code that can't run natively on the new device, into a format the new device can run. Upside, its way cheaper for the performance level; downside, it means everything isn't guaranteed to run out of the box.
Franky, I've never understood the whole concept of using "safe" as a criticism. Its basically treating "Actually does the logical thing with the material" as if its a bad thing, as opposed to what you should expect.
Hypothetically speaking, low level grunt QA work is exactly the kind of assembly-line labor that you'd really want to replace with automation.
In practice? This is going to be a spectacular disaster, because even said grinding grueling low level QA work still requires way too much individual judgement of vague, poorly-defined situations. I don't believe for a second they are going to create a useful AI for handling anywhere near 70% of the work, especially since there is basically no body of data with which to train such an AI. At least not without spending so much time and effort developing one as to make the idea that it saved them any money hilariously nonsensical.
( Well, okay, there is one way this might not be a disaster: It might be like a bunch of prior "silver bullets" the S-E execs latched onto, like NFTs. Which is to say, it might just never actually materialize. )
My theory remains that Other M was intended, early in development, to be a prequel, set before the original game. Hence why the earliest marketing material only showed "flashback" scenes rather than anything during the meat of the game- at that time they weren't flashbacks. This would much better justify the PTSD scene, since in this case it would be her first new encounter with Ridley since childhood; which is to say, it would basically just be the equivalent scene from the manga. Sadly, they decided at some point that the game had to be moved post-Super, presumably for fan service reasons. Or so goes my theory, which probably can't be proven barring massive behind the scenes reveals.
As for adaptations? Its kind of moot, as logically Other M shouldn't be relevant anytime soon if ever. Even if you ignore the "This game was terrible and broadly hated" angle, its a game whose story only makes even the slightest sense as a follow up to no less than three other games. You basically can't adapt anything from Other M until you've already done 1, 2, and Super.
That would depend on there being a significant number of people interested in multiplayer, but unable to afford even the objectively cheap current basic level of NSO subscription. To put it simply, I am highly skeptical that is the case. People who haven't subscribed almost certainly are doing so, not because they can't afford it, but because they aren't interested in online multiplayer. A free online-only subscription tier wouldn't make someone who bought the Switch to play Mario and Zelda, suddenly decide they have to go out and get Smash and dive into online fighting games.
Remember: Nintendo does not benefit from making "Total Account Number" metrics go up. They benefit from getting more actual customers pay them more actual money.
1. Definitely make it a series rather than a single long form production. Its a lot easier to tell several short stories about a taciturn hero than one single 2+ hour story. Look at The Mandalorian, especially the first season, and you have something in the ballpark.
2. Take advantage of the series format to go for a pseudo anthology vibe, where its less "a 10 part story about Samus Aran" and more "10 stories about or involving Samus Aran". That lets you dive into more aspects of her character and world, and shift the tone around. It also would let you more freely swap in supporting cast on a story by story basis.
Its a little weird, but I suspect its logical on a certain level: Nintendo wants a partner who has the resources to support big budget theatrical releases worldwide. . . but also is small and hungry enough that they can be confident of being the senior partner. Illumination likely hits that sweet spot.
I think its partially an artifact of too many people having internalized the "announce 5 years ahead, hype constantly" marketing paradigm that a lot of other big publishers do. They look at the announced release schedule and, consciously or not, treat it as a "everything in the next five years" list rather than a "everything in the next handful of months" list. Add a little cherry picking, and bam. Eight games in the next six months, gets treated emotionally as if it were four games in the next five years.
I mean, it probably won't remain that high. . . but dropping down to "only" as high as Mario Kart 8 would still leave it in the range of "impossibly high attach rates that the rest of the industry cannot even envision". Like, GTA doesn't achieve attach rates anywhere near that high.
I think commentators just tend to really underestimate Mario Kart, probably because its a strongly "blue ocean" game.
This is a common belief about GenAI, and flat out incorrect. As in, for this to be true would be like claiming perpetual motion is possible. A "live" GenAI no more has a catalog of all the stuff its been shown than you do, and for the same reason that zipping a ZIP file does nothing: data compression is finite. Proving this takes all of "Looking at the size of a Generative AI, and at the size of the training data set, and noticing the latter is many many orders of magnitude bigger than the former.
FOSS is a mixed blessing in this case, or at least a source of significant confusion. Most of the perception "Emulation is easy, why doesn't _____ just emulate _____?!" arises from people looking at amateur FOSS emulators, and assuming a company can just download one and use it. Which they technically could in a "not violating the laws of physics" sense, but pretty much every single FOSS emulator has licenses tied to them that make them useless for commercial purposes. If an emulator can't be used legally in a commercial for-profit product, and without being required to make the resulting game itself open source? It might as well not exist.
While true, the theoretical public good of "copyrights expiring on a more reasonable timeframe" is 100% irrelevant to this case, and the vast majority of similar cases. Unless a person were arguing for ludicrously short copyright duration, none of the relevant games would be even close to leaving copyright anyway, even without the Disney-pushed copyright extensions. Certainly every single game this particular offender has been pirating would all still be fully covered.
( Which is why "My piracy is justified because copyright abuse and preservation!" is almost always a laughably transparent excuse. 9/10 times its being claimed by people. . . about recent games that are readily available. )
Or don't simply "don't know or care", but actively disagree with the entire premise of the claimed outrage in the first place. In particular, I suspect the people whose primary complaint about "Evil Nintendo!" revolves around price? Underestimate how many people actually do look at their arguments and claims. . . and find them nonsensical to the point of discrediting anything else they say.
The "problem" is, that would require being willing to forgo getting something that you want. And sadly, the video game customer base has proven to have remarkably poor sales resistance or willingness to deny gratification. Thus the amount of pushback against any suggestion of "voting with your wallet".
I'm pretty sure they outright said why: because MK Gold is a Dreamcast game, and they don't have a workable Dreamcast emulator. They don't even have a workable N64 emulator as yet.
( Reminder for the room: Yes, fan-made open source emulators exist. Most if not all of these have licenses forbidding commercial usage or mandating than anything done with them also be made open source, which make them utterly useless for a commercial product. And, since they are almost always made for PC as a platform, they would need a ton of work to port to consoles for a viable product release, anyway. )
I think the better question: is that 30% profit target intentionally unreasonable, so as to justify other changes? Or is is deranged but sincere, thus indicating that the management has drunk some dangerously poisonous amounts of "line must go up" koolaid?
Though hopefully its a case of "I have already acquired funding, contingent on a successful crowdfunding campaign to prove interest". As opposed to "I hope I will be able to convince someone to provide added funding, if I have a successful crowdfunding campaign". The former is common and reasonable enough, while the latter is much more. . . speculative.
Unless Youtube is ready to send a cut of the advertising and subscription fees to Nintendo's bank account, I can't see why Nintendo would exactly prioritize sending a non-game developer devkits.
True to a point, but IIRC Nintendo had to do some major organizational revamping ( including "firing" said founder ) in order to create the Retro that we would recognize. It may not have been the first game made by some set of the individual employees, but it pretty much was the first game made by the organization.
This is pretty much my position. Like, there are a ton of totally real and genuinely worrisome aspects of generative AI, and this very much does include its impact on employment. But so much of the anti-AI discourse has a strong whiff of classism at best, and pretension at worst. Which is to say, it feels like the "offense" GenAI commits isn't "Taking away jobs and thus causing hardship", its "Making humans feel less special".
Regarding performance comparisons between different consoles, I think there is an aspect people overlook when focusing on technical possibility: amount of effort. Which is to say. . . does relatively poor performance on high powered consoles indicate that its technically impossible to port a game to Switch 2? No, or at least not with any degree of certainty. However, it very likely is a useful indicator of how likely a developer is to spend the effort to do a good port. If a developer doesn't care to put in the effort to make their game run "well" on PS5, that probably correlates with them not being willing to put in the effort to make their game run "well" on Switch 2.
( All else being equal, natch, which is not the same as "definitely". Its possible a developer may settle for unimpressive performance on one platform, because its easier and good enough; whereas they value "actually hitting salable levels of performance" on the Switch or Switch 2 enough for the added market, and if that means more work they'll pay for more work. )
Reread my post, please. In particular the line "The game is clearly inspired by the "Annihilation" cosmic event from earlier in the 2000s, and the various comic runs and events and crossovers that spawned out of it."
Also, "based on" is not the same thing as "is identical to".
Regarding the roster, its actually less weird than it might seem on first glance. The game is clearly inspired by the "Annihilation" cosmic event from earlier in the 2000s, and the various comic runs and events and crossovers that spawned out of it. This actually formed quite a chunk of Marvel comics for at least 5 years, and fairly influential- the "Guardians of the Galaxy" that are now famous from the MCU pretty much came straight out of it. And out of this roster, five of the fifteen ( Phyla-Vell, Nova, Rocket Raccoon, Silver Surfer, Beta Ray Bill ) were significant parts of that period.
And people wonder why the big AAA studios tend to spend all their, gigantic, budgets on pretty colors. A not-insignificant portions of the consumer base considers "HD photorealistic graphics" the only thing that can possibly justify paying MSRP.
I highly doubt there is any currently available automated translation software that would meet Nintendo's minimum standards for translation quality. Given the choice between "Putting out a product full of mostly-understandable clunky Engrish" and "Not putting out a product", Nintendo almost certainly would choose the latter.
Also, the reason the Quintet trilogy have never been released? Ownership rights issues. Basically, Quintet the company partially paid for the work by offering shares in ownership of the games to some of the key people involved, including the lead developer, the lead concept artist, and the lead composer. The lead developer is especially an issue, because sometime around the turn of the millennium he basically dropped off the face of the planet. No one knows how to contact him, or even if he's still alive, and thus no one has a way to get the sign off on using IP he ( partially ) owns. Doing anything with the games would thus risk having him, or his next of kin, show up with a lawsuit.
( As I understand it, there have been moves to changes Japanese law to allow a "good faith effort" defense against such legal problems. However, even if that did get enacted, it would still mean doing anything with the games would require paying for the signoff from the other involved people. )
How about a "Start of Darkness" ending as a consolation prize? Because if any game warranted a "And this is how the villain became an omnicidal maniac" plotline. . . ahem
Such public data as exists ( Steam, mainly ) suggests its selling really well by series standards. IIRC all its available Steam metrics match or exceed every other release to date. . . though being fair, this is at least partially due to a massive surge in Chinese sales.
How much this carries over to other platforms is tough to measure, but it certainly doesn't seem anywhere near a flop at least.
. . .because english translations don't magically appear out of thin air? They would have to be created, which costs money, at which point the value proposition of releasing them as a "free" addition to the NSO service becomes dubious. Maybe the budget could be justified if they were added as part of the premium NSO tier, but given there are still tons of games that could, with only the lesser cost of "configuring emulation", I'm dubious.
One can dream, but I suspect the reality is that it wouldn't change much. Nintendo didn't pass on buying Rare arbitrarily- they almost certainly did so because they saw the writing on the wall ( from things like "key employee retirement" ), and realized Rare was going to enter a decline. Best plausible scenario? I think they would have entered a state similar to Camelot, where they grind out periodic second tier titles that mostly have people going "Damn, don't you remember back when Rare was really awesome?"
Maybe they'd get pigeon-holed as "The Donkey Kong Studio", but that strikes me as a very mixed blessing since it would likely mean no Retro or EPD games. I'm not at all sure it'd be worth gaining a bunch of past-their-prime DK games from Rare if it means losing Tropical Freeze and Bananza. And don't forget that the team which made Super Mario Galaxy ( and all the key titles thereafter )? Got its start making one of those post-Rare titles, DK Jungle Beat. There's a lot of potential for negative butterflies.
Comments 93
Re: Feature: "It Wouldn't Be A Game-Key" - Broken Sword Dev On Potential Switch 2 Cart Release & Lobbying Nintendo For Dev Kits
@rallydefault
Its almost certainly a mix of two factors:
1. Nintendo keeping a tight rein pre-launch, to avoid having everything leaked years in advance. Meaning only those parties Nintendo trusted 99% not to blab constantly.
2. Simple supply and demand. Coming off the success of the Switch 1, every developer on the planet wants a devkit, and if they have one already they likely want more. However many devkits they produce per month, its not going to be enough anytime soon.
Re: Poll: Is Your Third-Party Switch 2 Dock Still Working After This Week's System Update?
@GinMiguel
Easy: Its not some magic malign malware. Its a firmware update. Some unlicensed accessories react badly to it, and some don't. Because part of being "unlicensed" is that they had to engineered their own compatible design, and different companies come up with different solutions.
Re: The Indie Game Awards 2025 GOTY Nominee List Is Packed With Switch Hits
A solid list of quality candidates. My only gripe is that Clair Obscur absolutely does not belong on this list: Sandfall is a small studio, but if a studio with 50+ employees counts as "indie" than so does a uselessly-broad swath of the industry. Might as well nominate the Trails in the Sky Remake.
Re: Japanese Charts: Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment Slashes Through The Competition
Will a cheaper PS5 increase sales in Japan? Sure.
Will it increase sales a substantial amount, such as to fundamentally change the market situation? I highly doubt it. Its not like you'd be looking at a price drop from $500 to $100- the PS5 is still going to be an expensive investment in hardware, not an impulse buy. And pricing won't change the "size" and "library" problems. If Sony really wanted to improve their situation in Japan, they'd be better off spending money making and marketing games that appeal to the Japanese audience. However, that would require actual effort, as opposed to the comparatively cheap cost of hacking together a region-locked SKU.
Re: Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition Switch 2 Compatibility Update Released
You know. . . has anyone considered the potential scenario "There is no 60 FPS mode, and never will be"? Just because there is code related to such in the release game, doesn't mean there's the intent to turn that into a finished feature. It could just as easily be the remnant of a proposed feature that has since been abandoned, or perhaps soft-abandoned in the "no current plans, maybe we'll do something with it sometime" sense.
Re: Sony Once Again Takes A Leaf From Nintendo's Playbook In Japan
@RoboCube
Yeah, but that would require Sony to actually invest in making games other than giant GAAS moonshots and prestige VGA-bait titles. And Sony seems to hate doing that ( probably because nobody inside Sony gets rewarded for doing bread-and-butter work ).
Re: Sony Once Again Takes A Leaf From Nintendo's Playbook In Japan
@Itsthingking
Citation needed. Note, "banning consoles for using pirated/ripped games" is not bricking. The consoles still function just fine, they simply aren't allowed onto Nintendo's networks anymore.
Re: Sony Once Again Takes A Leaf From Nintendo's Playbook In Japan
@dmcc0
This, as I understand it. Its less about the region locking and more the language locking. Which makes sense: Nintendo isn't trying to control sales of games by region; they are trying to keep their home region from being drained of hardware by export shenanigans.
Re: Anniversary: Romancing SaGa 3 Celebrates 30 Years Of Eclipsing Death
My only complaint about the remaster is the difficulty spike with the final dungeon. It was otherwise surprisingly accessible for a SaGa game, and kind of felt like they crammed an entire choice-and-consequence WRPG into the FF6 engine.
Re: 'PokéPark Kanto', The New Pokémon Theme Park, Opens Its Doors In February
@Fiskern
I'm almost certain the issue isn't about "justifying the budget". Its about "guaranteeing release dates". The Pokemon games are part of the larger Pokemon Marketing Machine, and so have to come out at the designated time for crossmarketing purposes. Thus, everything has to be built around "the game can never ever be delayed", because missing out on a release slot could cost extremely large amounts in total revenue from reduced sales of everything else.
Re: Hollow Knight: Silksong Update Announced, Here Are The Patch Notes
@squiddu-real
This. I am extremely sympathetic towards the desire for difficulty settings, but this isn't like a Souls game where you could do an easy mode by all of "reduce enemy damage by 10%" or the like. Damage is too granular for that work all that well, and most of the real difficulty is platforming anyway, IMO.
So. . . no, I'm not going to say that people who want a difficulty selector are "wrong" or "bad". I would however suggest that anyone calling for such should specify exactly what changes they want, rather than some vague non-specific "difficulty selector".
Re: Nintendo Switch 2 System Update 21.0.0 Is Now Live, Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@ROBLOGNICK
I suspect the answer is "no", because it probably is a result of the physical properties of the battery itself.
Re: Nintendo Launches Switch 2 Backwards Compatibility Search Page
@sportymariosonicmixx
Simple answer: Because your premise, that the Switch 2 is "just a Switch 1 XL", is false.
Longer answer: Because backward compatibility is not magic. How well it works depends on the technical details of how its implemented, which depends on what you are trying to be BC towards. The only way to get 100% backward compatibility is by effectively including a copy of the same hardware in the new device. The Switch 2 does not do that, because it would be wildly impractical; it instead uses a "compatibility layer" to convert those portions of Switch 1 code that can't run natively on the new device, into a format the new device can run. Upside, its way cheaper for the performance level; downside, it means everything isn't guaranteed to run out of the box.
Re: Poll: What Do You Make Of The Mario Galaxy Movie's Leaked Yoshi Design?
@Waluigi451
Franky, I've never understood the whole concept of using "safe" as a criticism. Its basically treating "Actually does the logical thing with the material" as if its a bad thing, as opposed to what you should expect.
Re: Square Enix Aims To Automate 70% Of QA With Generative AI By 2027
Hypothetically speaking, low level grunt QA work is exactly the kind of assembly-line labor that you'd really want to replace with automation.
In practice? This is going to be a spectacular disaster, because even said grinding grueling low level QA work still requires way too much individual judgement of vague, poorly-defined situations. I don't believe for a second they are going to create a useful AI for handling anywhere near 70% of the work, especially since there is basically no body of data with which to train such an AI. At least not without spending so much time and effort developing one as to make the idea that it saved them any money hilariously nonsensical.
( Well, okay, there is one way this might not be a disaster: It might be like a bunch of prior "silver bullets" the S-E execs latched onto, like NFTs. Which is to say, it might just never actually materialize. )
Re: Nintendo Is Preparing For Even More Movies In The Future, Unsurprisingly
@Hawkes142
My theory remains that Other M was intended, early in development, to be a prequel, set before the original game. Hence why the earliest marketing material only showed "flashback" scenes rather than anything during the meat of the game- at that time they weren't flashbacks. This would much better justify the PTSD scene, since in this case it would be her first new encounter with Ridley since childhood; which is to say, it would basically just be the equivalent scene from the manga. Sadly, they decided at some point that the game had to be moved post-Super, presumably for fan service reasons. Or so goes my theory, which probably can't be proven barring massive behind the scenes reveals.
As for adaptations? Its kind of moot, as logically Other M shouldn't be relevant anytime soon if ever. Even if you ignore the "This game was terrible and broadly hated" angle, its a game whose story only makes even the slightest sense as a follow up to no less than three other games. You basically can't adapt anything from Other M until you've already done 1, 2, and Super.
Re: Nintendo Shares Updated Figures For Registered Accounts And Switch Online Members
@ShadLink
That would depend on there being a significant number of people interested in multiplayer, but unable to afford even the objectively cheap current basic level of NSO subscription. To put it simply, I am highly skeptical that is the case. People who haven't subscribed almost certainly are doing so, not because they can't afford it, but because they aren't interested in online multiplayer. A free online-only subscription tier wouldn't make someone who bought the Switch to play Mario and Zelda, suddenly decide they have to go out and get Smash and dive into online fighting games.
Remember: Nintendo does not benefit from making "Total Account Number" metrics go up. They benefit from getting more actual customers pay them more actual money.
Re: Nintendo Is Preparing For Even More Movies In The Future, Unsurprisingly
@Hawkes142
My main thoughts on Metroid adaptations:
1. Definitely make it a series rather than a single long form production. Its a lot easier to tell several short stories about a taciturn hero than one single 2+ hour story. Look at The Mandalorian, especially the first season, and you have something in the ballpark.
2. Take advantage of the series format to go for a pseudo anthology vibe, where its less "a 10 part story about Samus Aran" and more "10 stories about or involving Samus Aran". That lets you dive into more aspects of her character and world, and shift the tone around. It also would let you more freely swap in supporting cast on a story by story basis.
Re: Nintendo Is Preparing For Even More Movies In The Future, Unsurprisingly
@Vyacheslav333
Its a little weird, but I suspect its logical on a certain level: Nintendo wants a partner who has the resources to support big budget theatrical releases worldwide. . . but also is small and hungry enough that they can be confident of being the senior partner. Illumination likely hits that sweet spot.
Re: Raidou Remastered Is Getting A Free Demo On Switch & Switch 2
Could be the late demo is a belated effort to juice sales hurt by the unnecessary use of a keycard.
Re: Nintendo Reconfirms Release Windows For Major Upcoming Switch 2 Games
@Pillowpants
I think its partially an artifact of too many people having internalized the "announce 5 years ahead, hype constantly" marketing paradigm that a lot of other big publishers do. They look at the announced release schedule and, consciously or not, treat it as a "everything in the next five years" list rather than a "everything in the next handful of months" list. Add a little cherry picking, and bam. Eight games in the next six months, gets treated emotionally as if it were four games in the next five years.
Re: Here Are The Top Ten Best-Selling Nintendo Switch Games As Of September 2025
@Synecdoche
I mean, it probably won't remain that high. . . but dropping down to "only" as high as Mario Kart 8 would still leave it in the range of "impossibly high attach rates that the rest of the industry cannot even envision". Like, GTA doesn't achieve attach rates anywhere near that high.
I think commentators just tend to really underestimate Mario Kart, probably because its a strongly "blue ocean" game.
Re: Bandai Namco, Square Enix And Other Japanese Publishers Aren't Happy About OpenAI's Sora 2 Generative AI Tool
@Samalik
This is a common belief about GenAI, and flat out incorrect. As in, for this to be true would be like claiming perpetual motion is possible. A "live" GenAI no more has a catalog of all the stuff its been shown than you do, and for the same reason that zipping a ZIP file does nothing: data compression is finite. Proving this takes all of "Looking at the size of a Generative AI, and at the size of the training data set, and noticing the latter is many many orders of magnitude bigger than the former.
Re: Review: Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection (Switch 2) - A Killer Kompilation, But Online Is A Mess At Launch
@The_Nintendo_Pedant
FOSS is a mixed blessing in this case, or at least a source of significant confusion. Most of the perception "Emulation is easy, why doesn't _____ just emulate _____?!" arises from people looking at amateur FOSS emulators, and assuming a company can just download one and use it. Which they technically could in a "not violating the laws of physics" sense, but pretty much every single FOSS emulator has licenses tied to them that make them useless for commercial purposes. If an emulator can't be used legally in a commercial for-profit product, and without being required to make the resulting game itself open source? It might as well not exist.
Re: Nintendo Wins Lawsuit Against 'Pirate' Streamer Who Taunted Company Online
@The_Nintendo_Pedant
While true, the theoretical public good of "copyrights expiring on a more reasonable timeframe" is 100% irrelevant to this case, and the vast majority of similar cases. Unless a person were arguing for ludicrously short copyright duration, none of the relevant games would be even close to leaving copyright anyway, even without the Disney-pushed copyright extensions. Certainly every single game this particular offender has been pirating would all still be fully covered.
( Which is why "My piracy is justified because copyright abuse and preservation!" is almost always a laughably transparent excuse. 9/10 times its being claimed by people. . . about recent games that are readily available. )
Re: Nintendo Wins Lawsuit Against 'Pirate' Streamer Who Taunted Company Online
@poyo_pie
Or don't simply "don't know or care", but actively disagree with the entire premise of the claimed outrage in the first place. In particular, I suspect the people whose primary complaint about "Evil Nintendo!" revolves around price? Underestimate how many people actually do look at their arguments and claims. . . and find them nonsensical to the point of discrediting anything else they say.
Re: Nintendo Wins Lawsuit Against 'Pirate' Streamer Who Taunted Company Online
@KayFiOS
The "problem" is, that would require being willing to forgo getting something that you want. And sadly, the video game customer base has proven to have remarkably poor sales resistance or willingness to deny gratification. Thus the amount of pushback against any suggestion of "voting with your wallet".
Re: Review: Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection (Switch 2) - A Killer Kompilation, But Online Is A Mess At Launch
@The_Nintendo_Pedant
I'm pretty sure they outright said why: because MK Gold is a Dreamcast game, and they don't have a workable Dreamcast emulator. They don't even have a workable N64 emulator as yet.
( Reminder for the room: Yes, fan-made open source emulators exist. Most if not all of these have licenses forbidding commercial usage or mandating than anything done with them also be made open source, which make them utterly useless for a commercial product. And, since they are almost always made for PC as a platform, they would need a ton of work to port to consoles for a viable product release, anyway. )
Re: Microsoft On Its Gaming Business Going Forward: "We Want To Be Everywhere"
@Questionable_Duck
I think the better question: is that 30% profit target intentionally unreasonable, so as to justify other changes? Or is is deranged but sincere, thus indicating that the management has drunk some dangerously poisonous amounts of "line must go up" koolaid?
Re: Rune Factory 4 Director Hopes To Bring His Next Farming Sim To Consoles
@Lizuka
Though hopefully its a case of "I have already acquired funding, contingent on a successful crowdfunding campaign to prove interest". As opposed to "I hope I will be able to convince someone to provide added funding, if I have a successful crowdfunding campaign". The former is common and reasonable enough, while the latter is much more. . . speculative.
Re: YouTube Is Working With Nintendo To Make Its App Available On Switch 2
@DonnieTACO
Unless Youtube is ready to send a cut of the advertising and subscription fees to Nintendo's bank account, I can't see why Nintendo would exactly prioritize sending a non-game developer devkits.
Re: "We Couldn't Find Common Ground" - Nintendo Producer Explains The Tensions That Forged Metroid Prime
@Qwiff
True to a point, but IIRC Nintendo had to do some major organizational revamping ( including "firing" said founder ) in order to create the Retro that we would recognize. It may not have been the first game made by some set of the individual employees, but it pretty much was the first game made by the organization.
Re: EA Is Diving Headfirst Into Generative AI With New Partnership
@OpheliaDynamight
This is pretty much my position. Like, there are a ton of totally real and genuinely worrisome aspects of generative AI, and this very much does include its impact on employment. But so much of the anti-AI discourse has a strong whiff of classism at best, and pretension at worst. Which is to say, it feels like the "offense" GenAI commits isn't "Taking away jobs and thus causing hardship", its "Making humans feel less special".
Re: Switch 2's First Warhammer 40,000 Game Isn't The One You Might Expect
Regarding performance comparisons between different consoles, I think there is an aspect people overlook when focusing on technical possibility: amount of effort. Which is to say. . . does relatively poor performance on high powered consoles indicate that its technically impossible to port a game to Switch 2? No, or at least not with any degree of certainty. However, it very likely is a useful indicator of how likely a developer is to spend the effort to do a good port. If a developer doesn't care to put in the effort to make their game run "well" on PS5, that probably correlates with them not being willing to put in the effort to make their game run "well" on Switch 2.
( All else being equal, natch, which is not the same as "definitely". Its possible a developer may settle for unimpressive performance on one platform, because its easier and good enough; whereas they value "actually hitting salable levels of performance" on the Switch or Switch 2 enough for the added market, and if that means more work they'll pay for more work. )
Re: Marvel Cosmic Invasion Scores December Release Date And Two New Fighters
@Mommar
Reread my post, please. In particular the line "The game is clearly inspired by the "Annihilation" cosmic event from earlier in the 2000s, and the various comic runs and events and crossovers that spawned out of it."
Also, "based on" is not the same thing as "is identical to".
Re: Marvel Cosmic Invasion Scores December Release Date And Two New Fighters
Regarding the roster, its actually less weird than it might seem on first glance. The game is clearly inspired by the "Annihilation" cosmic event from earlier in the 2000s, and the various comic runs and events and crossovers that spawned out of it. This actually formed quite a chunk of Marvel comics for at least 5 years, and fairly influential- the "Guardians of the Galaxy" that are now famous from the MCU pretty much came straight out of it. And out of this roster, five of the fifteen ( Phyla-Vell, Nova, Rocket Raccoon, Silver Surfer, Beta Ray Bill ) were significant parts of that period.
Re: No Man's Sky 'Breach' Update Gets Spooky With New Explorable Ship Wrecks
@SuppressorSteve
And people wonder why the big AAA studios tend to spend all their, gigantic, budgets on pretty colors. A not-insignificant portions of the consumer base considers "HD photorealistic graphics" the only thing that can possibly justify paying MSRP.
Re: Nintendo's Trademarking 'Virtual Console' Again, But Don't Get Your Hopes Up
@RCGamer
I highly doubt there is any currently available automated translation software that would meet Nintendo's minimum standards for translation quality. Given the choice between "Putting out a product full of mostly-understandable clunky Engrish" and "Not putting out a product", Nintendo almost certainly would choose the latter.
Re: Anniversary: SNES Action RPG 'Terranigma' Is 30 Years Old Today, And It's Still A 10/10 In Our Book
Also, the reason the Quintet trilogy have never been released? Ownership rights issues. Basically, Quintet the company partially paid for the work by offering shares in ownership of the games to some of the key people involved, including the lead developer, the lead concept artist, and the lead composer. The lead developer is especially an issue, because sometime around the turn of the millennium he basically dropped off the face of the planet. No one knows how to contact him, or even if he's still alive, and thus no one has a way to get the sign off on using IP he ( partially ) owns. Doing anything with the games would thus risk having him, or his next of kin, show up with a lawsuit.
( As I understand it, there have been moves to changes Japanese law to allow a "good faith effort" defense against such legal problems. However, even if that did get enacted, it would still mean doing anything with the games would require paying for the signoff from the other involved people. )
Re: Anniversary: SNES Action RPG 'Terranigma' Is 30 Years Old Today, And It's Still A 10/10 In Our Book
@axelhander
How about a "Start of Darkness" ending as a consolation prize? Because if any game warranted a "And this is how the villain became an omnicidal maniac" plotline. . . ahem
Re: Absolum And Ball X Pit Post Excellent Initial Sales, But They Deserve More
@the_beaver
Such public data as exists ( Steam, mainly ) suggests its selling really well by series standards. IIRC all its available Steam metrics match or exceed every other release to date. . . though being fair, this is at least partially due to a massive surge in Chinese sales.
How much this carries over to other platforms is tough to measure, but it certainly doesn't seem anywhere near a flop at least.
Re: Nintendo's Trademarking 'Virtual Console' Again, But Don't Get Your Hopes Up
@RCGamer
. . .because english translations don't magically appear out of thin air? They would have to be created, which costs money, at which point the value proposition of releasing them as a "free" addition to the NSO service becomes dubious. Maybe the budget could be justified if they were added as part of the premium NSO tier, but given there are still tons of games that could, with only the lesser cost of "configuring emulation", I'm dubious.
Re: Banjo-Kazooie Director Marks Departure From Rare With A Poem
@OstianOwl
One can dream, but I suspect the reality is that it wouldn't change much. Nintendo didn't pass on buying Rare arbitrarily- they almost certainly did so because they saw the writing on the wall ( from things like "key employee retirement" ), and realized Rare was going to enter a decline. Best plausible scenario? I think they would have entered a state similar to Camelot, where they grind out periodic second tier titles that mostly have people going "Damn, don't you remember back when Rare was really awesome?"
Maybe they'd get pigeon-holed as "The Donkey Kong Studio", but that strikes me as a very mixed blessing since it would likely mean no Retro or EPD games. I'm not at all sure it'd be worth gaining a bunch of past-their-prime DK games from Rare if it means losing Tropical Freeze and Bananza. And don't forget that the team which made Super Mario Galaxy ( and all the key titles thereafter )? Got its start making one of those post-Rare titles, DK Jungle Beat. There's a lot of potential for negative butterflies.