Archive for Nintendo

Here We Go Again (On the Price of Games)…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on October 24, 2025 by chemiclord

So, I would never have thought that I’d have a discussion about Kirby beyond the real history behind the character (he was named after the lawyer that helped Nintendo win the rights and trademark to Donkey Kong). But here we are!

So, it turns out that the price for the new Kirby Air Riders has been released, and boy, are some people on social media not very happy that it clocks in at the $70 price point. This is not at all surprising to me. In my almost five decades on this earth, I have seen this unique Five Stages of Grief play out specifically twice (to the former Blizzard developer that snarled at me about it, no this isn’t some “nostalgia” speaking, I was no snot-nosed kid the last two times this happened; I was a grown ass man paying for my own stuff and my memories are very clear).

From the era where games were literally all over the place (those Super Nintendo ads from the early 90s that have game prices anywhere from $35 to $90+ aren’t fake folks, they are very, very real), to the early days of standardized prices, to the bump to $60 in the early aughts, to the now $70 bump… gamers have always bristled when the prices went up. Hell, this current grousing isn’t even particularly worse. So, if I seem dismissive of it to some small degree, it’s for a reason. This isn’t new, and there’s nothing particularly “fresh” about this current age of protest that tells me it’s going to be particularly different this time around.

At least, not specifically in gaming. Economic pressures as a whole are a different tale that has yet to be fully told.

It’s also a big part of the reason why “taking a side” on this isn’t as easy as both “sides” want it to be, because there are legitimate reasons on both sides, in a way that wasn’t exactly true the last few times this happened.

Let’s start with how the industry’s price increases are valid. Yes, it is very true that games and game hardware has not kept up with inflation over the last twenty-some-odd years. Just like with the bump to $60 as the industry standard, there comes a point where a static price point simply becomes untenable, and the industry probably held out longer than it should have.

And I say that because it is very clear that there’s a degree that the complaints are empty. Contrary to what gamers want to believe, people are willfully spending more than they ever have on their games, even adjusting to inflation, thanks to how “free-to-play” games are happily fleecing gamers far more harshly than up front prices ever did. The same community complaining about $70 cover prices generally has no problem dropping $100 a pop on a gacha system slot machine (though they don’t hesitate to complain about it).

They also gripe about $80 games… yet happily spent $60, then $10, then $15, then $20 on increasingly robust DLC packages. This isn’t economic uncertainty speaking here… it’s mere sticker shock, and I personally don’t find that a particularly compelling argument from people who absolutely have the means to pay the extra cost (which I would suspect is a significant majority of gamers).

There is also the simple reality that hobbies are expensive, and gamers honestly get off pretty close to the easiest on that score. Name any hobby, of any slant, in any area of interest, and hoo boy, if you think the prices of games are problem…

Just ask any avid hiker about the costs of just being able to fucking walk through the wilderness. If you are going to be invested in something to the point that you want to genuinely enjoy that experience, it’s simply going to cost you a lot of money. There is a massive degree that it is, to put it bluntly, unavoidable, and a reality that said hobbyist has to accept.

Now, with all that said, there’s no small degree that the arguments of the industry are more than a little bit of bullshit as well. While it’s true that gamers ask for more than they ever did, game developers and studios and publishers overplay that desire.

“Gamers want 8k/120fps with photorealistic 3D effects… etc. etc.”

Do we, though? Do we really? The biggest hardware hit of the last generation didn’t even have 4k capability. Hell, it couldn’t even run a lot of its games at its stated max performance of 1080p. And the “most powerful console of its time” finished in such a distant third that its publisher now is trying to sell their software subscription service to anyone willing to host it.

“Games require so many more people and take so much more time that prices have to reflect that…”

Does it though? One of the best games of the year sold for $50 with a team of (if I recall correctly) 30 developers, not including the contracted work by voice actors and whatnot (which most publishers don’t count in their employee roster anyway).

While I am dubious that smaller teams producing smaller games with less development time sold for less is a replicable answer across the entire industry (play time became a selling point in the “golden age” of gaming because gamers rejected that idea in the 90s and 2000’s), it is certainly possible to deliver a premier experience with less overhead, and its been done fairly frequently.

And finally, there is the reality that the purchasing power and disposable income for a lot of gamers hasn’t meaningfully increased over the years. I am not convinced that group is a majority by any stretch (again, people are genuinely ponying up despite the increases), but its a group that certainly exists, and doesn’t like the idea that the industry is leaving them behind. They can see the writing on the wall here, and that they are being priced out of the games they loved as children as those companies chase the disposable income of those higher up the purchasing ladder.

Yeah, all those words to say… I don’t know if there is a simple answer to this problem. I’d say that there really can’t be a solution until the Great Revolution overthrows this late-stage capitalist world… but considering how poorly communist governments tend to treat games (or any artistic expression, for that matter), there might not be a particularly satisfactory solution on the other side, either.

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What is Worth $80?

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on April 20, 2025 by chemiclord

Disclosure time: I am a bit of a Mario Kart fiend. For whatever reason, ever since that first game popped up on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, I’ve been nigh addicted to that silly kart racer… even when it honestly wasn’t the best of its genre, much less the only one of its genre.

Let’s be honest, Diddy Kong Racing was doing a lot of what Mario Kart is just getting to doing, but for whatever reason, that game never resonated with me quite like the OG. I’ve put roughly 200 hours into every freakin’ title except 7 (and that was only because I didn’t have the 3DS at that time). I’m reasonably certain I will do the same with Mario Kart World.

So for me… is it worth $80? Sure. Do I like that sticker price? Not really. But I’ll grin and bear it because I’m going to get my money’s worth.

Now I don’t begrudge anyone who looks at that same title, shrugs, and says, “That’s not worth $80.” That’s actually entirely fair. If you’re not someone who is going to put 200 hours into it (and I’d wager a ton of people won’t), that’s not a price tag that’s going to compel a purchase. That’s okay. That’s a lot of money to spend on one game.

But what does grind my gears are the dramatics that a lot of gamers are exhibiting over this price point. You’d think this was some sort of daytime soap opera and they just discovered their fiancée has slept with their rival on the eve of their wedding from the reactions they are vomiting on the web. You’d think these gamers are on the brink of homelessness and starvation with the way they are wailing about how they “can’t afford” these unreasonable prices.

Dry your crocodile tears, build a bridge, and get over it. “Why isn’t this $70? $80 is simply too much! I can’t afford that!” Fuck off. If ten bucks is the breaking point for your budget, then I’m gonna be perfectly blunt and tell you that you shouldn’t be buying Mario Kart World at any price point. You shouldn’t be buying it at $70. Hell, you shouldn’t be buying it at $50 (which is the price point that you’d get it in the Nintendo Switch 2 bundle).

If your financial situation is that tenuous that $10 is simply a bridge too fucking far, then you need to back away and not buy anything at all. If you simply can’t afford it at $80, then you can’t afford it at $70. Likewise, if you can afford it at $70, then you can find that extra Hamilton in your budget. You don’t have to like it (like I don’t particularly), but you can do it. Don’t pretend you can’t. Don’t pretend like you’re going to have to subsist on beans and rice for three months because you put that extra cash down on a video game.

Drop the sob stories. Drop the drama. There is a perfectly acceptable to reason to reject that price point, one that doesn’t require you to make yourself look like a damn fool.

“It’s not worth $80.” There ya go. That’s all ya need… and that’s all that Nintendo is going to listen to at the end of the day anyway.

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Sega Does What NintenDon’t

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , , on April 19, 2023 by chemiclord

It’s a bit interesting that the topic of Nintendo and their heavy legal hand has jumped into the news again. In 2004, this very topic was the subject of my sophomore year thesis paper for journalism composition. So, this is something that I actually had a bit of (dated) knowledge about. But one thing I’m not is astonished that they largely haven’t changed their stripes in the following twenty years, because they had been largely the same way twenty years before my exploration into their legal procedures.

One thing that I’d ask people to internalize is the phrase “technically correct,” because you’re probably going to hear it quite a bit in this blog post.

Part of the “Nintendo Problem” is that I think gamers are asking the wrong questions. The important question isn’t, “Why is Nintendo like this? Why do they shut down fan projects? Why do they harass Youtubers and other content creators?” Because that question has a very simple (and technically correct) answer. “Because they have to.”

See, the case with Nintendo isn’t about copyright. They certainly have copyrights to all of their work, but that’s not what compels them to be so aggressive. The issue is that Nintendo takes most of their IPs into the realm of trademark, which is a somewhat related but altogether different thing.

Trademark behaves much like a lot of gamers think copyright works. Trademark requires you to “defend it or lose it.” And it is actually a fight over trademark that is the core of one of Nintendo’s most prominent IPs.

We’re gonna dial the time machine to 1982. Nintendo had a deal for a Popeye video game fall through, and Shigeru Miyamoto decided to rework the game they had to feature “Jumpman” (who was the inspiration for Mario), and a big ape named “Donkey Kong.” I won’t go through the entire blow for blow of that case, but there’s a pretty good write-up of it at this link.

Long-ish story short; Nintendo was able to demonstrate that Universal Studios did not adequately defend the King Kong trademark, allowing tons of unlicensed material of King Kong to exist… and that’s presuming that Universal Studios even held the trademark for King Kong to begin with, which they also managed to cast into doubt.

At the end of the day, Nintendo won on quite literally every count, and they learned all the wrong lessons from that battle. Realizing just how powerful trademark can be, they started trademarking everything that wasn’t nailed down, and probably a few things that were. By the time I wrote my thesis almost twenty years ago, they had approximately 1500 unique trademarks, and assuredly that number is even larger now.

Some of those trademarks are positively absurd. For example, the sound the Mario games make when he collects a coin? That is a Nintendo trademark. The rainbow hued charging plates you saw in the (long ignored) F-Zero series? Yep. That’s a Nintendo trademark. Each and every different suit that Samus has ever worn in the Metroid series? Yeah… I think you see where this is going.

The question really shouldn’t be “Why is Nintendo so aggressive?” The question should be, “Why the hell does Nintendo have so many profoundly ridiculous trademarks?”

It’s because Nintendo realized the power of trademark. It allows them the legal power to shut down mods of their games in ways that copyright really doesn’t. Nintendo’s executives will shrug and say that trademark compels them, and they’re technically correct.

It’s why they can shut down a Let’s Play for charity (which they have been doing literally from the instant Justin.tv was birthed into existence). They’ll respond, “We have to. If we didn’t shut down this charity stream for St. Jude, then someone like Tucker Carlson can host an anti-trans stream using the same game, and we can’t stop him.” This is also technically correct.

But, technically correct isn’t actually correct. Nintendo uses restraint quite frequently when handling trademark issues, and exercises considerable discretion… when they want to. For a great number of derivative works, Nintendo is more than willing to see no evil (just take a look through any Nintendo IP category on AO3 or Deviantart for evidence of that). They can absolutely allow fair use without risking their trademark, and they do so quite frequently.

As a general rule, there are two ways to raise your risk of receiving a letter from Nintendo’s Legal Division to the danger zone:

The first way is to create a fan work of something they are in planning to do, or in active development of. This is what got the creator of the Mario Battle Royale and the fan remake of Samus Returns in trouble, evidenced by the “limited release” of Mario 35, and the official remake of Samus Returns.

These are things that are rather petty; clearing the field of any potential (and free) competition for their products. This isn’t uniquely a Nintendo problem. For example, if someone had made a fan remake of Resident Evil 4, Capcom is quite angrily demanding that get yanked off of the creator’s Google Drive. If someone developed a Final Fantasy game and called it Final Fantasy 16, SquareEnix isn’t going to be patting them on the back and saying good work.

But that’s not how it has to be. Bethesda happily invites mods of their work, and has on a couple occasions tried to launch programs to financially compensate modders for their work. Sega (as the title of this blog post implies) happily embraces fan work. Hell, if you do a good enough job, they’ll hire you do it. That’s how one of the Sonic series came to be, if I remember correctly.

Nintendo could be a lot more agreeable on this score. They choose not to be. That’s an active choice, not one compelled solely by trademark.

The second way to get on Nintendo’s shit list is what the bulk of the complaints on this issue stem from, however, and it’s one where there is a very clear narrative that one side really wants you to buy, sometimes quite literally.

When you try to make money off of Nintendo’s IP.

When Gary Bowser (yeah, if I had a nickel for every time a Nintendo story popped up about a real life dude named Bowser, I’d have two nickels… which isn’t a lot, but kinda funny how it happened twice) was arrested and his wages garnished for the rest of his life, he wasn’t just some nice guy trying to help poor kids play Nintendo games that just couldn’t afford them. He was one of the brains behind a group called Team Xecuter, a hacker collab that sold ransomware hidden under the hood of Nintendo products. You can certainly argue that his punishment is excessive (40 months in jail, and $10 million in fines to be paid to Nintendo), and I’d honestly agree, but he was not some fair Robin Hood of this story being railroaded by this massive corporate Sheriff of Nottingham, and that people want to believe he is isn’t really Nintendo’s problem outside of the PR hit they are taking in the court of public opinion.

It’s also at the heart of a lot of content creators that are seeing their videos stripped of ad revenue. This tends to happen every time Nintendo is getting ready to launch a title on one of their flagship IPs. Now, the nature of fair use when it comes to Youtube videos or other “critical” media is very blurry, and it’s not entirely clear whether or not such videos that use extensive cuts of copyrighted and/or trademarked IP falls under that umbrella. Nintendo absolutely is taking advantage of that ambiguity to bully Youtube and Twitch and TikTok or whatever into shutting down monetized content.

But, as I noted, this isn’t new. These content creators know exactly who they are dealing with, and what they potentially risk, when they post a video about Nintendo products and hit that “ad revenue” option. They know that Nintendo videos get eyeballs, and rack up the most views and ad revenue as a result. That’s why they are constantly trying to make Mario and Zelda and Metroid videos, and not Sonic or Skyrim. These are largely not innocent people just trying to show their love for their favorite products. These are fans who are trying get some scratch, and are using their favorite games to do it. They’re inviting people to sub to their Patreon for quick sneak peeks. They’re inviting them to donate or sub to their Twitch channel (you get one free sub if you have Amazon Prime, ya know).

These are people who know they are riding a tiger. They shouldn’t be crying out their victimhood when that tiger mauls them.

What Nintendo wants out of their exercise of trademark is the right to dictate how the customer enjoys their product, sometimes in very specific ways, on terms that can seem like they change daily. If you find those terms agreeable (and hundreds of millions of people very clearly do), then you’re not going to see much of a problem with Nintendo’s practices. Frankly… that’s okay. Nintendo is not a monopoly, and they don’t even dictate how video game fair use is handled, much less media as a whole. It’s not the dire issue that a legion of content creators want you to think it is.

That said, if those IPs are something you are emotionally invested in, it’s also okay to be angry about how Nintendo treats those who want to express their love of that product. Nintendo is willfully obtuse about the legality of what they do, nor are they always consistent in how they handle derivative works. It is worthy of criticism, even if it’s not the dire omen that those who are also financially invested want you to believe it is.

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Here We Go Again…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on July 8, 2021 by chemiclord

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

That’s a figure of speech. I’m not actually going to stop, even though I promise you that you’ve heard this story many times before.

The enthusiast press for games hears some rumors from a handful of different sources about plans a game company wants to do. Without thinking or any real editorial oversight to connect the dots, they rush to publish these rumors because they just have to break this story first.

Then begins the mad rush with multiple outlets not wanting to get left behind, so they rush to publish, turning the loosely connected strings into a jumbled ball that can no longer be unwound.

Because now the gamers have a hold of it, and the hype train that the press started is now completely in their hands, and the gamers have aimed that train right at the damned wall.

Again.

Meanwhile, said company repeatedly states that they have no plans to do what is being reported. They shoot down every and all statements that they are about to make an announcement about what they have already said they aren’t planning. They tell their investors there are no such plans.

It doesn’t matter.

And when the inevitable happens, that the thing the company has been telling gamers for months wasn’t going to happen doesn’t happen… gamers get violently mad at the company that didn’t promise anything.

It would be funny, if it didn’t happen so often without anybody seeming to learn anything. Now it’s just annoying.

In this case, this is the story of Nintendo, and the oft hyped and speculated Switch “Pro,” which remains in the ether, and will probably remain in the ether no matter how many times Nintendo refreshes their Switch console.

This most recent rumor that turned the masses into a ravening mob was started by Bloomberg, then quickly backed up Eurogamer, and Kotaku, and CNet, etc. If any of them had actually stopped to think about what they were reporting, this might have stopped at a dull roar rather than the incendiary social media fire that burst up in the wake of the completely unremarkable hardware refresh Nintendo actually announced.

Now, in a partial defense of these outlets, I don’t think they were fed lies. I’m actually confident that their sources are accurate when they said that Nintendo has been sourcing higher power components. I’m sure Nintendo has talked to internal developers about 4K resolution and/or DLSS. I’m sure Nintendo has discussed potential ways to add performance boosts into the dock, because that’s a patent Nintendo has held since before the original Switch console was put on the market.

(Don’t believe me? That patent can still be found here.)

But where the enthusiast press failed was not pausing to think. Nintendo is a company that has about two hundred ideas bouncing about at any given moment. They start developing their “next generation” of hardware before the current gen is even being shipped. If any of them had taken the time to actually put the pieces together, I have no doubt that the picture would have shown exactly what Nintendo told their investors; that they are always looking at hardware, but no significant upgrades were coming any time soon.

Pro tip: whenever you want to know what a company’s plans are, listen to what they tell their shareholders. Companies that aren’t planning some sort of financial crime generally don’t lie to them.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. Stop fighting for the right to be first; start fighting to be the first to be right.

As for the gamers… I’ve given up on those lemmings. They will tell themselves whatever they want, and will always blame those who never promised anything for breaking their promises. Because gamers seem to be utterly incapable of self-reflection.

As always, gamers are what’s wrong with gaming.

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