Category Archives: Nintendo

Getting Played: The $70 Content Lie

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I used to be all woooo, but then I released a new video, and now I’m all weeeee again!

Walk into any game store today and you’ll see boxes screaming about “100+ HOURS OF CONTENT!” plastered across their covers. Open any gaming forum and watch people defend $70 price tags by calculating dollars-per-hour like they’re shopping for bulk toilet paper. The gaming industry has successfully convinced an entire generation that content equals value–and it’s the biggest lie ever told to consumers.

But here’s what they don’t want you to know: this isn’t just bad economics. It’s psychological warfare.

The Dead Theory Walking

The idea that a product’s value comes from the labor or materials that went into it has a name: the Labor Theory of Value. Karl Marx popularized it in the 1800s, and economists have been systematically dismantling it for over 150 years. Yet somehow, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have resurrected this zombie theory to justify price hikes while making games actively worse.

Consider this thought experiment: I spend six months hand-crafting the world’s most elaborate buggy whip using premium leather and traditional techniques. By the Labor Theory of Value, this should be incredibly valuable; after all, I invested massive amounts of skilled labor and expensive materials. But in reality, it’s worthless. Nobody wants buggy whips anymore, regardless of the craftsmanship.

Value isn’t determined by input costs. It’s determined by what buyers are willing to pay based on their subjective assessment of worth.

This is basic economics that’s been settled science since the 1870s. Yet gaming companies keep pushing the dead theory because it serves their narrative perfectly. “Our game had 500 people working for 5 years!” they boast, as if any of that matters  when discussing the value of the game.

The Psychology of Getting Played

So why does this obvious fallacy work so well on gamers? The answer lies in several psychological biases that the industry deliberately exploits:

Anchoring Bias: When you see “100+ hours of gameplay!” on a box, that number becomes your reference point for value. Your brain anchors to that figure and uses it to justify the price, even though hours of padding aren’t equivalent to hours of quality.

Loss Aversion: Nintendo are absolute masters of this manipulation. Remember the artificial scarcity of Amiibos? Mario 3D All-Stars being “limited time only” for no technical reason? Mario 35 disappearing forever after a few months? They’ve weaponized FOMO to make you pay premium prices for products they could produce infinitely, but choose not to.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy (Applied Preemptively): Once you’ve paid $70 for a game with “100 hours of content,” your brain feels obligated to extract value by playing all of it, even after it stops being fun. The industry has weaponized your own psychology against your enjoyment.

Motivated Reasoning: You start with the conclusion that your expensive purchase was worthwhile, then work backwards to find evidence. “Sure, 40 hours were tedious, but I got 100 hours total, so it was worth it!” Your brain rewrites your own experience to protect your ego.

The Bloated Development Problem

Now, development costs do matter. Materials cost money. Paying developers costs money. These are legitimate business expenses that affect pricing. But in addition to the fact that a thing’s price isn’t necessarily equal to its value, the real problem is that the gaming industry has created wildly bloated development budgets by focusing on the wrong things.

Modern AAA games cost $100-200 million to develop. Where does that money go? Not into making games more fun. It goes into:

  • Photorealistic grass that players barely notice
  • Celebrity voice actors who phone in their performances
  • Marketing campaigns that cost more than development
  • Hundreds of employees creating padding content instead of focused experiences

Compare this to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which cost an estimated $30 million and delivers a complete, polished experience that respects your time. No padding, no artificial length extension, just quality gameplay from start to finish. These extraordinary qualities (which should be quite ordinary) marketed the game, as word of mouth spread its praises like syphilis.

The issue isn’t that games cost money to make – it’s that studios have lost all sense of proportion and efficiency, then passed those inefficiencies on to consumers while pretending it’s about “content value.” Just look at the above screenshot, where Grand Theft Auto VI is being praised for individually modeled grass and freaking butts. Your next GTA will be more expensive because some pervy developer wanted to make coomer bait.

The Efficiency Paradox

Here’s the ultimate irony: modern games are designed to get you through them as efficiently as possible while simultaneously wasting as much of your time as possible.

Think about it. Why do games have quest markers, breadcrumb trails, and glowing objectives pointing you exactly where to go? If efficiency was bad for entertainment, wouldn’t these be considered design failures? The answer reveals the industry’s twisted priorities: they’re not optimizing for your fun, they’re optimizing for content consumption metrics.

The quest markers aren’t there to help you–they’re there to ensure you see all the “content” the marketing department wants to brag about. You’re being efficiently shepherded through a content consumption pipeline disguised as a game.

And here’s the psychological masterstroke: if the game escorts you through in a streamlined, tidy way, it’s less likely to feel like it’s designed to waste your time. The smooth progression creates the illusion of meaningful advancement, even when you’re just being led through elaborate time-wasting exercises.

When Fans Become Unpaid Marketing

The propaganda works so well that gamers now voluntarily spread it. I recently watched a content creator argue that Mario Kart World’s $80 price isn’t a cash grab because “they had a lot of passionate developers working on it for a long time.” He was literally peddling Marx’s Labor Theory of Value without even knowing it.

Then he defended the fact that nobody’s playing the game by saying Nintendo made it to sell the Switch 2, not to make a good Mario Kart game. Think about that logic. “It’s okay that the game isn’t good because it was designed to sell hardware, not provide entertainment.”

This is Stockholm Syndrome in action, defending a company that’s actively making worse products while charging more money.

Breaking the Spell

The most efficient way to play a game is to not play it at all. So why are publishers trying to get as close to that as possible with mindless padding while simultaneously rushing you through predetermined experiences?

Because they’ve confused consumption with entertainment.

Real entertainment should be the opposite of efficient. You should want to linger, explore, experiment, and get lost. When a movie is “efficient,” we call it rushed. When a vacation is “efficient,” you’ve missed the point entirely. Yet gaming has convinced us that efficient consumption of predetermined content equals value.

Every time you buy a game based on “hours of content,” you’re telling the industry that padding works. Every time you defend bloated games because they offer “value,” you’re enabling the practices that make gaming worse.

The Nintendo Hypocrisy Test

Want proof that Nintendo doesn’t actually believe content equals value? A few years ago, they charged $5 for Balloon Fight, a 1984 NES game with maybe 15 minutes of unique content. By their current reasoning (the reasoning they use to justify $80 games), Balloon Fight should have cost about 30 cents.

But Nintendo charged $5 because they knew people would pay $5 for the nostalgia and simple fun.

Value came from what the game meant to players, not from how much stuff it contained.

The same company that thinks a 15-minute NES game is worth $5 now claims their $80 racing game is fairly priced because of “content.” The hypocrisy reveals their true understanding of economics; they know content doesn’t determine value.

Demanding Better

Value isn’t determined by how much stuff a game has. It’s determined by whether that “stuff” is worth your time and money. A 5 hour masterpiece that changes how you think about games is infinitely more valuable than a 100 hour checklist that wastes your life.

Stop buying games based on content metrics. Stop defending padding as “value.” Start demanding quality over quantity. Support games like Hades, which provides hundreds of hours of evolving gameplay through smart design rather than padding. Support games like Vampire Survivors, which costs $3 and delivers more value than most $70 releases. Support games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which avoids that nonsense.

Vote with your wallet. Show the industry that we won’t accept:

  • Games that waste our time with busywork;
  • Pricing based on debunked economic theory;
  • Content padding disguised as value;
  • Psychological manipulation disguised as game design

Your time is worth more than whatever they’re trying to sell you. Don’t let them turn your hobby into homework.

The gaming industry wants you to think like an accountant: hours in, dollars out, optimization everywhere. But games aren’t spreadsheets or rice at Costco. They’re experiences. And experiences can’t be measured by the pound.

What do you think? Have you fallen for the content trap? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and don’t forget to check out the full video analysis of this topic.

Getting Played: The Quest System

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I’m creating a series of videos on my Under the Hood Gaming channel that is focused on the psychological exploitation and manipulation prevalent in modern game design, including single-player games where you ordinarily wouldn’t expect that sort of thing. The series was debuted earlier with a feature on the Quest System.

I’ve talked about the Quest System before, and I mentioned Dragon Age: Inquisition a lot, and it still breaks my heart that Inquisition was what it was, instead of being a masterful story experience about the war between the Chantry and the Mages (a war that took a backseat in Inquisition before being effectively resolved in a single quest). While I will have to truly get my heartbreak expressed one day, that isn’t today, and instead this video is about the Quest System.

There’s a moment in every gamer’s life when they realize they’re not having fun anymore—they’re working. Maybe it’s the fiftieth “collect 10 of X” quest in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Maybe it’s staring at a minimap instead of the beautiful world developers spent years creating. Maybe it’s that sinking feeling when you see a 99% completion rate and know you’ll lose sleep until you find that last collectible.

If you’ve experienced this, congratulations: you’ve discovered how modern game design has transformed players from adventurers into unpaid digital laborers.

The Birth of Digital Serfdom

The quest system epidemic didn’t start with malicious intent. Like many gaming disasters, it began as a practical solution to a technical problem. In 1999, EverQuest faced a challenge no one had solved before: how do you provide content for thousands of concurrent players without destroying your servers or requiring an army of writers?

The answer was the now-infamous [Action] [Number] [Object] template. Kill 10 wolves. Collect 15 herbs. Deliver 3 packages. These weren’t designed to be engaging; they were industrial efficiency made interactive. Fast food for the brain, served by algorithms instead of chefs.

World of Warcraft perfected this system after discovering that testing players constantly asked “what’s next?” The solution proved to be quest chains that constantly guided the player, and predictable rewards, essentially turning the game into a sophisticated task management system, complete with Pavlovian conditioning. It worked brilliantly—for MMORPGs dealing with massive populations and technical constraints.

The problem came when single-player games started copying these systems without understanding why they existed in the first place.

The Great Contamination

Between 2010 and 2015, something catastrophic happened: developers began importing MMO mechanics wholesale into single-player experiences. Games that should have been carefully crafted adventures became checklist simulators, trading meaningful exploration for content volume metrics.

Dragon Age: Inquisition became the poster child for this contamination. BioWare, reacting to criticism about Dragon Age II‘s reused environments, decided bigger was better. Instead of handcrafting content, they imported MMO design: vast zones with sparse content, fetch quests requiring multiple collectibles, and a “Power” currency that forced players to complete side quests to progress the main story–and to wait many real-life hours, exactly like the garrison missions of World of Warcraft.

The result was what players immediately recognized as a “single-player MMO”—a game that felt designed for multiple players but trapped you in solitary digital labor. Maps became to-do lists filled with quest hubs and littered with quest objectives. Exploration became all about optimizing efficiency.

Adventure became work.

Even Nintendo, once the masters of tight game design, fell into this trap. While Breath of the Wild mostly got exploration right, they looked at their success and thought players wanted more collecting. Enter Tears of the Kingdom with its device hoarding mechanics—because apparently Link’s greatest adventure is becoming a digital packrat.

The Psychology of Exploitation

The most insidious aspect isn’t boring gameplay—it’s how these systems exploit fundamental psychological mechanisms. Modern quest design leverages principles that make gambling addictive and workplace surveillance effective. To be fair, the gameplay usually is boring: since it relies on exploiting innate psychological traits to drive engagement, they don’t have to be entertaining. Being fun becomes superfluous, because players will do it whether it’s fun or not, simply because they need to check the item off the lost.

The Zeigarnik Effect explains why unfinished tasks stick in memory more than completed ones–your brain literally can’t let go of unchecked boxes. Game developers exploit this by creating infinite task lists—every objective cleared spawns more map markers, every quest completed unlocks three more. It’s psychological quicksand.

Completion Anxiety triggers when you see percentage meters. That 97% completion rate? Your brain interprets that missing 3% as a personal failure, creating genuine stress that won’t resolve until you find every collectible. It’s weaponized perfectionism.

Cognitive Offloading occurs when external systems replace internal thinking. When games provide minimaps and quest markers, your brain stops creating mental maps. You become dependent on UI to navigate, like using GPS so much you can’t find your way home without it.

Compare this to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which deliberately has no minimap. Players must “actually pay attention to the environment” because developers trusted them to navigate like human beings. The result? After 120+ hours, I’m still discovering details in areas I’ve visited dozens of times. When games don’t spoon-feed objectives, you engage with the world instead of clearing it like a to-do list.

The Minimap Menace

Perhaps no mechanic better illustrates these problems than quest markers and minimaps. These systems fundamentally alter how players interact with game worlds, reducing rich environments to waypoint connections with everything between treated as obstacles to efficiency.

Try playing any modern Zelda game without the map constantly open—you’ll realize Hyrule is basically identical hills with copy-pasted trees. Compare this to Morrowind, which provided detailed directions: “Go along this road, till you pass the big oak, we call it ‘Widow’s Oak’… Right past it, go right, go along the small pathway until you see some rocks.”

Modern games simply update your UI and call it navigation. It’s like having conversations through PowerPoint presentations.

The Standardization of Wonder

The real tragedy isn’t just individual boring games—it’s that entire genres converging on identical templates. The “Ubisoft Tower” became synonymous with lazy open-world design: climb structure, reveal map icons, clear markers mechanically. Even when Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Desilets apologized for unleashing towers on gaming, it was too late—the template had metastasized.

Nintendo looked at Ubisoft’s formula and decided it needed more grinding, scattering shrines across Hyrule like someone sneezed collectibles onto the map. At least Ubisoft’s towers were visible from a distance. Nintendo made you hunt for content like digital Easter eggs containing disappointingly similar puzzle boxes.

This standardization eliminates genuine surprise. When you know that noteworthy encounters only appear at points of interest, exploration becomes predictable pattern recognition rather than authentic discovery. Players develop metacognitive expectations that shape how they approach all games, training them to think of virtual worlds as productivity software rather than spaces for imagination.

I recently bought the RoboCop game because it was on sale for $5, and I quit less than ten minutes in, because this was a first-person shooter, and it had just given me a Quest that I could view by pressing L, which was broken down into other objectives that would populate as I completed them, and the game helpfully provided a Skyrim-like compass at the top of the screen pointing me exactly to where I needed to go. Don’t explore, don’t look around, don’t play a game–just follow this series of breadcrumbs to where the developers want you to go. No thought needed! 

When our first-person shooter plays and acts like Skyrim, it foretells a major problem in gaming: this homogenization means every game is increasingly like every other game. RoboCop might as well be Skyrim, but the dealers are putting out Nuke instead of Skooma.

The Resistance

The encouraging news is some developers have recognized these problems and pioneered alternatives. Breath of the Wild revolutionized open-world design by using towers to reveal terrain without populating maps with objective markers. Players must manually scout points of interest, fundamentally changing how exploration feels. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 bucks all of these homogenous trends to create an experience that is engaging because the gameplay and story are compelling, rather than because of innate psychological weaknesses.

Alternatives prove engagement doesn’t require exploitation. Games can trust players to explore organically when designed for intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation.

Reclaiming Our Agency

The quest system epidemic represents a broader crisis in interactive entertainment. When games prioritize retention metrics over player satisfaction, completion rates over genuine engagement, and behavioral manipulation over creative expression, we lose something essential about what makes play meaningful.

We’ve turned the medium that should celebrate human agency into sophisticated mechanical operations, transforming players into digital pieceworkers measured by productivity metrics and completion percentages rather than experiential richness.

But recognition is the first step toward recovery. The success of games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Outer Wilds, and Elden Ring suggests audiences hunger for authentic exploration rather than sophisticated task management.

The next time you boot up a game and see a map covered in objective markers, ask yourself: Am I playing, or am I working? Am I exploring a world or clearing a checklist? Am I having an adventure or performing digital labor?

The answer might surprise you—and change how you think about the games you choose to play.

Gaming can be more than sophisticated behavioral manipulation. It can be a space for genuine discovery, meaningful choice, and authentic play. But only if we recognize the difference between games that respect our humanity and games that treat us like expensive lab equipment designed to generate engagement metrics.

The choice is ours. We just have to remember that we’re players, not products.

For more analysis of how the gaming industry exploits player psychology, watch the full “Getting Played: The Quest System Trap” video and subscribe to Under the Hood Gaming.*

Nintendo is Peddling Bullshit—And Gaming Media is Complicit

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We’ve just launched our new channel, Under the Hood Gaming! After existing for a few days, we’ve published our first video examining the psychology behind modern gaming practices. While we plan to post on Odysee as well, that’s a future project—our director is juggling multiple tasks right now, but it’ll happen within the next few weeks.

Your support would mean everything to us: subscribing to the channel, watching the video, and leaving likes, comments, and shares all help tremendously.

This isn’t our first critique of the Nintendo Switch 2 and Nintendo’s practices. I covered many of these issues in written form a few weeks ago, but the video adds new information and context. Plus, you can listen while doing dishes or commuting to work.

Why Gaming Content on an Anarchist Network?

This marks LRN’s expansion beyond talk shows into other content areas. After all, anarchist principles don’t require anarchist-themed shows exclusively—our values naturally emerge in our work, just as Stephen King’s progressive views appear in his novels without dominating them.

But how does a gaming channel fit an anarchist network? Liberty takes many forms. Beyond freedom from fear of death (which we’ve discussed on Free Talk Cast), we need freedom from psychological manipulation and the freedom to genuinely enjoy life. Modern gaming companies exploit psychological vulnerabilities for profit, and that’s worth examining.

Why I’m Criticizing Nintendo

You might wonder why I’m so critical of Nintendo lately. Ironically, it’s because I love Nintendo and want them to be the best gaming company, not the most exploitative. I want them to stop phoning in their game design for the same reason a parent would be frustrated watching their gifted child half-ass a piano recital.

Nintendo used to be the only company I’d buy from on launch day—I trusted their quality completely. I didn’t hesitate to pay $70 for Tears of the Kingdom. But somewhere along the way, I lost that trust.

Was it Skyward Sword HD for $60? Link’s Awakening selling for more than twice its original price despite running poorly? Echoes of Wisdom feeling overpriced at $60? Even Super Mario Wonder, which sounds excellent, feels like it should be called “New Super Mario Bros. 3″—and I can’t justify $60 for a 2D platformer that takes under 10 hours to beat.

The Content Pricing Contradiction

Nintendo claims games are priced according to content, but their pricing is wildly inconsistent. If Mario Kart World costs $80 because of its content volume, how did they justify selling Ice Climbers for $5? How are Super Mario Party and Super Mario Odyssey the same price as Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door?

Nintendo must either price games according to content or not—they can’t claim one thing while doing another. Well, they can, but we should call out their bullshit.

The Media Problem

Gaming media seems complicit in this. They want to maintain access to review codes and exclusive interviews, so they soft-pedal criticism. I’ve seen sites describe Mario Kart World’s open world as “big and empty, with nothing to do” and then call it “wonderful” in the same paragraph.

Games media did criticize Welcome Tour for not being free, but this felt like a softball Nintendo threw deliberately. Having spent time in federal prison, I learned that when authorities are searching for something to criticize, you give them something minor to find so they don’t discover what really matters. Nintendo gave gaming sites Welcome Tour to critique while the real issues went unexamined.

I’m not claiming conspiracy, but the pattern is troubling. When gaming sites praise 5-year-old and 2-year-old games (Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom) as reasons to buy $450 hardware, that’s impressively out of touch with reality, and it suggests a bigger underlying problem with criticism not being directed at Nintendo. I’m financially comfortable, but I won’t pay that much to replay games I’ve already completed, even with minor improvements. The thought of buying new hardware to play graphically improved versions of games I’ve already paid (and paying extra for the improved versions!) is inherently gross to me, and games media spouting that justification feels like attempting to fleece gamers.

The Replay Problem

This highlights a broader issue. I’ve exhausted Pokémon Scarlet after 250 hours—competitive battling, perfect IV breeding, EV training, raid farming, even buying Violet for exclusives. There’s nothing left for me to do.

The same happened with Tears of the Kingdom after 112 shrines and 97 light roots. I started a second playthrough but quit after the second dungeon because nothing was different. Everything I did in the second run, I’d done in the first, but without the excitement of discovery. I’ve gotten a little more replay value from Breath of the Wild, but that’s because I skipped so many of BOTW’s shrines in my first two playthroughs.

I’m looking for new experiences. I’m sorry, but I’m not looking to play through Ocarina of Time again. And I’ve still got a Wii U, so if I want to play The Wind Waker, then I’m going to play its improved version, not the GameCube emulated version (by all accounts, Nintendo’s GameCube emulator is also pretty bad).

Upcoming Content: The Quest System Trap

Our next video, “Getting Played: The Quest System Trap,” examines how modern games have reduced exploration to following waypoints. You go somewhere because there’s an icon on your map. An NPC gives you a quest, you press L for your quest log, M for your map, and follow the waypoint to kill the enemy with the quest icon.

Why are you doing this? Who knows? And do you care anyway? The NPC probably explained, but there’s no reason to pay attention when the game provides all necessary information through UI elements.

This isn’t just nitpicking. Information processing used to be required for games, contributing to brain development through spatial modeling, problem-solving, and navigation skills. When games do this work for players—called cognitive offloading—we lose these abilities and become more dependent on automated assistance.

Animals play to hone survival skills. Humans do the same, developing alertness, coordination, and threat awareness. Video games traditionally served this function, but increasingly they reduce player involvement to mechanical actions while handling all information processing automatically. The result feels more like filling out a spreadsheet than engaging in meaningful play.

The Path Forward

Games can be better than this. As Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 proves, games can offer rewarding, enriching experiences that enhance our lives rather than just providing cheap dopamine hits from checking off items on a list.

Don’t Buy a Switch 2

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There once was a company who fought hard to save the gaming industry. Their hard work made them phenomenally successful, and they seemed to consistently fill out their staff with people who genuinely cared about games and the gaming industry. But rumors started to circulate about a takeover of the company by business people–ones who didn’t care about the state of gaming or video games, and were more interested in profits. While their passion for games had made them incredibly successful, the new leadership seemed to stop prioritizing games over profits, and began prioritizing profits over games. The games became uninspired and uninteresting, never deviating much from what made other games successful. Slowly but surely they took fewer risks in game design.

This was no longer a company that would follow up The Legend of Zelda with a 2D sidescroller. This was instead a company that would release a new controller for their new safe, uninteresting console, and would put on this controller a button that is locked behind a paywall. And their fans, who had the wool pulled over their eyes for so many years that they no longer knew they couldn’t see clearly, put out arguments like “It doesn’t matter, because everyone is paying the paywall anyway, so it’s really free.”

If you have to pay money for something, then it isn’t free.

Don’t Buy A Switch 2

I’m not going to buy a Switch 2. And I am going to ask you to not buy a Switch 2, but before we get too deeply into that, it’s important to get some stuff out of the way first.

Yes, I’m being a hater. I’m not a hater, but I am currently being one. I love Nintendo and their games; if you’ll look at my page on Open Critic page on Open Critic, you’ll see that the original Zelda is my favorite game. I don’t know if that would hold true today, though I have played The Legend of Zelda through more times than any other game, and I have a long and storied history with the franchise, as well as Pokémon, Mario, and Super Smash Bros. I love Nintendo, and I totally understand the appeal of their games.

It is because I love Nintendo that I want to see the Switch 2 crash and burn. The NES comprised nearly my entire childhood. Then I played my SNES extensively, distracted only by dipping my toes into Dungeons & Dragons. I was lucky to have gotten an N64, and I put countless hours into Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye 007, and Super Smash Bros. Into the GameCube era, I still did not waver, and had no interest in other consoles. While I did have a PSX and later PS2, these were my supplementary systems. If I bought a new multi-platform game, like Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, then I bought the GameCube version. I confess that I mostly skipped the Wii, having no interest in motion controls, and only picked one up late in its life, but I bought a Wii U at launch, and was there for its mess from the start. So don’t think I’m just anti-Nintendo.

PC Master Race

But I’ve seen the light. I’m a PC gamer these days, and you could never convince me to go back to being a console gamer. I revel in my multiple storefronts, my free online gaming, my free online chat–through Steam or through Discord.

PC gaming is the anti-Nintendo. Every game you’d ever want to play is available on PC, minus a few exclusives (although the Age of Console Exclusives is drawing to a close). Nintendo is stodgy with their emulated games via Switch Online, but PC gaming doesn’t have that same problem. PC gamers aren’t limited to the slow drip of highly select games that Nintendo thinks we should play, which include some very odd choices, and it doesn’t really matter what anyone thinks about the legality of this. It’s here, it exists, and virtually no one is at legal risk for downloading some ROMs online. And while I’m not encouraging this, it exists, it happens, and it’s not going away. To pretend like PC gamers can’t play Breath of the Wild is denial at its worst, because not only is Breath of the Wild available on PC with minimal setup, but it notoriously runs more smoothly and with vastly improved graphics.

Emulation, though, isn’t what keeps PC gaming robust and thriving. PC gaming thrives precisely because it’s an open platform. If Valve tried charging for online play, a new storefront would appear almost overnight that would not make such a ridiculous mistake. Valve has competition, and the mere possibility of a new arrival to the scene forces Valve to stay in line. PC gaming is a rich and varied pro-consumer landscape not because PC gamers are entitled, but because PC is an open market. Nintendo charges for online play because it can, because people playing their games have nowhere else to go.

Nintendo can charge whatever they want and do whatever they want precisely because of their continued isolationist behavior into an age where it has been shown to be myopic at best to cling to these ideas. When Microsoft began putting their games on PlayStation and PC, someone near the top of their hierarchy described it as “printing money.” They learned that they could make far more money by having their own platform while taking advantage of other platforms. One is left to wonder why Nintendo is so hellbent on maintaining their own platform, despite razor-thin profit margins, if the reason is not simply protectionist garbage that represents the old way of thinking. Yet the Switch 2 has launched, at almost no profit, and has been successful.

The Price is Offensive

Plenty of people are heralding the Nintendo Switch 2 as the most successful console launch of all time, this was because Nintendo, for once in their miserable history, actually produced a fair amount of the things they are selling, and because a console’s initial sales mean absolutely nothing. I would remind everyone that even the Wii U sold out at launch. So I wouldn’t celebrate the success of the Switch 2 quite yet.

There has long been an unspoken agreement between Nintendo and gamers, borne of necessity because, for the last several generations, Nintendo’s consoles simply weren’t up to the task of being a person’s only gaming console. I say this as someone who had a GameCube, Wii, Wii U, and Switch, almost all at launch, and it’s simply true that if you had any of these consoles, then you had another console to play everything that wasn’t a first-party Nintendo game. To do otherwise would be to sit on the sidelines, looking with envy at the people playing The Witcher 3, Skyrim, and other titles that were never going to run on Nintendo’s hardware at the time.

This was okay, during the GameCube and Wii eras, because the price of admission–literally, the cost of the hardware necessary to play the gated Nintendo games–was relatively low. At $200, it wasn’t too big a deal to buy one of these consoles in addition to the PlayStation 2 or Xbox 360. The Nintendo Wii U broke this tradition for the first time, launching at $300. And while this may seem a trivial difference, it represents a price increase of 50% from the previous console, and came with a number of larger problems.

On top of this, the price of their games has skyrocketed by 33% and more for the Switch 2, with $70 and $80 games becoming their new standard. Having paid $50 for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and gotten more than 120 hours of playtime with it, I can’t help but marvel at Nintendo’s latest spiel that games with more content should have a higher price. Of course, this is a natural extension of the commoditization of gaming over the last several years, where achievement percentages, concurrent player count, and playtime have come to be considered important (spoiler: they aren’t).

Enter the Wii U

Contrary to popular and misguided belief, the Wii U did not fail because people didn’t know whether it was a console or a controller. The soccer moms who bought the Wii because it was the Furby and Tickle-Me-Elmo for a while may have had that confusion, but gamers knew that the Wii U was a new console. Let’s be honest for a moment and recognize that the soccer moms who bought the Wii because it was the latest fad were never going to get a Wii U in the first place, because they had moved on to the next Beanie Baby craze or whatever. Nintendo did not realize this, and thought they were going to ride into the sunset with the soccer moms, and utterly neglected the core gaming audience that had supported them through the bad decisions of the N64 and GameCube.

The result was a failure, but not because the Wii U had a bad name. Honestly, the name wasn’t really even that bad, and it was clear to people who were likely to buy it that the Wii U was a console, not a controller. No, the Wii U failed because in their arrogance and complacence, Nintendo had forgotten to make any games for the damned thing.

Only some games can be a console-seller. They seem to require a robust single-player campaign, a compelling story, and lots and lots of stuff to do. New Super Mario Bros. Wii U and NintendoLand didn’t meet that criteria, and pickings for the Wii U were so sparse that, just a few months into the console’s life, Nintendo held a Direct where they promised that they are working on a new Zelda and a new Mario, among other things. They didn’t have any footage to show, because the games weren’t even far enough along for that, but they were making games, like totes 4 real! Just be patient!

The problem, of course, is that when you buy a $350 console, you expect to have games to play for it, and the Wii U had very little to offer. Breath of the Wild came so late in the Wii U’s life that it was also a launch title for the Nintendo Switch, and, in fact, it’s so closely associated with the Switch that people seem to forget that it is a Wii U game. This makes Nintendo’s greed, on full display with an end price of $120 for Breath of the Wild on Switch 2 ($60 for the base game, $20 for the DLC, $20 for the Switch 2 Upgrade, and $20 for the Switch 2 upgrade for the DLC) even worse than it already seemed. And let me stop people right here: the Switch 2 upgrades aren’t “free” if you have Nintendo Switch Online. It is simply included in your purchase of Nintendo Switch Online. If something requires a purchase, then it is not free.

There seems to be nothing to actually play on the Switch 2. Mario Kart World is not the sort of game one can binge 5 hours a day for multiple days; there just isn’t enough there to entice players. The next major release, Donkey Kong Bonanza, is going to try to fix things, but it won’t be able to. And I must say, it is revealing that Nintendo is leading with its B list and C list series with their new console. As much as people have liked Donkey Kong games over the years, they are not system sellers and will never be. Donkey Kong 64 wouldn’t even have been able to move expansion paks for the N64, and thus they were bundled with it. I wonder how many fewer copies of DK64 would have been sold if the memory expansion had been a separate purchase.

Nintendo’s Anti-Consumer Behavior

It’s sad that such a thing has to be said, but Nintendo has so deftly pulled sleight-of-hand tricks on its fans for such a long time that many have lost all perspective, but free things don’t cost money. The GameChat button being locked behind a paywall isn’t okay, even if that paywall is something that most people already have. It is gatekeeping a button on a controller from people who cannot afford the subscription fee, or who simply don’t want to pay the subscription fee, and that’s a level of brazen anti-consumer behavior that I’m shocked to see even from Nintendo.

They locked their controller behind a paywall.

If EA pulled this, people would go nuts. If Assassin’s Creed locked the ability to press Select to open the map behind a $3 unlock, people would demand Ubisoft’s head. If Warcraft 3 Reforged locked the online matchmaking behind a lobby that cost $12/year to enter, the pitchforks and torches would be gathering outside Activision’s property. When Bethesda even suggested the idea of gating some mods behind a paywall, players snapped and were having none of it

But here is Nintendo, who has put a button on a controller, and put the function of that controller behind a paywall and people are acting like it isn’t a big deal. In and of itself, in a vacuum, such a gross maneuver would be a big deal, but Nintendo doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and their behavior causes a chain reaction that influences other developers and publishers. As of now, it’s a chat feature that isn’t really mandatory (although there are certainly some online games where chat is virtually mandatory), but I don’t think other gaming companies are going to let that be the case for long. After all, once upon a time, loot boxes were only supposed to offer cosmetic content.

How long until Sony locks their analog shoulder buttons behind a paywall? “Pay to unlock the full experience!” Maybe Microsoft will put haptic feedback bundled into the Xbox GamePass Ultimate subscription. After all, it would be free then, right? Maybe Bethesda and EA will get in on the action: “Saving and loading is free, but Quick Save and Quick Load are now bundled with the Season Pass!”

Everyone, calm down, stop freaking out. It isn’t that big a deal. Quick Save and Quick Load are part of the season pass that most people are gonna get anyway, so it’s still free.

Can We Stop Pretending We Aren’t Broke?

Nintendo often becomes the test market for larger changes in the gaming industry, precisely because they have fans who are willing to overlook, or make excuses for, their anti-consumer behavior. Nintendo could come out and charge $9.99 a year for the air gamers breathe when playing Nintendo games, and their fans would say, “Yep, mmhmm. Okay, no biggie. It’s only $9.99 a year.”

But again and crucially, none of these things happen in a bubble. Not only will gaming companies mimic Nintendo’s behavior, but the majority of people paying the Nintendo Switch Online fee aren’t using the Switch or Switch 2 as their primary consoles, so this just raises the price of entry even more for what has always been an affordable supplement to one’s entertainment setup. People need GamePass, a paid Internet connection, electricity, Netflix, Hulu, and all manner of other things, and it’s simply a statement of fact that all of those things compete together and interact together, creating choices that consumers constantly have to make. Nintendo Switch Online for $50 a year is a good value, but the cost isn’t negligible, not in an era where two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. In fact, the odds are that most of the people saying “It’s just $50 a year” are themselves completely broke before payday, which makes this talk online even worse, something like a combination of Stockholm Syndrome, denial, and Internet Tough Guy syndrome. Some people out there can’t afford a coffee from Dunkin Donuts when they wake up on their payday, and yet they’re online telling people “It’s just $50 a year.”

Which, of course, is on top of the $450 for the console itself, and then the overly expensive games. $450 absolutely prices a lot of people out of the console, because it’s no longer a cheap supplement at that price. It represents a 50% price increase from the first Switch, and that isn’t a number to scoff at. It’s a big deal, given the long, unspoken agreement been Nintendo and gamers. It was the Wii U that first violated this tradition (notably, the Wii U followed the tremendously successful Wii), launching at $350 and coming with no real games to catch people’s interest.

Let’s say you bought a Switch 2 because you want to play Mario Kart World. Having beaten it in less than 8 hours, you try to go online, only to learn that you have to have Nintendo Switch Online to play online. This makes your total payment $550. How many people out there really have $550 to throw around like that? Do you, reader, actually have any money in your savings account? That isn’t a judgemental question–two out of three Americans are broke and drowning in debt; the economy is at fault, not you. It doesn’t change the fact, though, that rolling our eyes at a very expensive console, a need to pay an ongoing $50 a year, and $70-80 things is justified. We’re all broke. Let’s stop pretending we aren’t.

There’s a lot of speculation in this story, but even without anyone speculating about who developed Donkey Kong Bonanza, not a word has been said by Nintendo about an upcoming Mario or Zelda. This is because, if there is anything in the works, then it is obviously years away. Even the next Pokémon game, which should be right around the corner given how long ago Scarlet and Violet released, has had nothing official revealed. How far away are these games? Game Freak is about to release a pretty awesome looking game onto, interestingly, everything except the Nintendo Switch 2, but all we have for the illustrious, console-selling Pokémon games is Pokémon Legends ZA, which is cool for those people who liked Pokémon Legends: Arceus, but I was not among those people, and I want my next mainline Pokémon. I briefly played competitively, after all–this is not a passing desire for me. In fact, a sufficiently alluring mainline Pokémon could make me eat every word I’ve ever said by causing me to buy a Switch 2.

But where is it?

Especially after The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and now the bone that gamers were thrown after they ill-advisedly begged for Wind Waker for years, a new Zelda game is at least a few years away. This is two Nintendo’s biggest franchises. This is their juggernauts, their titans, their literal console sellers. And they are MIA, not even a promise from Nintendo that we’ll see one of them next year–because we won’t. Realistic expectations put a new Zelda or 3D Mario into 2027 at the earliest. Is Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment going to scratch the Zelda itch until then? Hardly–Age of Calamity was hardly a worthy successor to either Breath of the Wild or Hyrule Warriors. 

Boredom, Boredom, and More Boredom

Just what are people supposed to do with their Switch 2? Nintendo seems to be utterly confused about who is buying games and why, but almost no one bought a Switch because they wanted to play Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. If Mario Kart 8 had been a console-seller, then the Wii U wouldn’t have been a failure, since Mario Kart 8 launched on the Wii U, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is a port of the Wii U title. This logic is irrefutable. If people had been willing to buy a Switch to play Mario Kart, then they would have been willing to buy a Wii U to play Mario Kart.

Donkey Kong and Metroid are good enough franchises, but they are more like Mario Party than anything else. What I mean by this is that they are games people buy when they already own the console, because they need something to play on it and, if nothing else, Nintendo’s games are usually fun. You know before you buy Mario Party Jamboree what it is going to be, and that it will be a good time here and there. It’s filler. It’s the chips and snack cakes we eat between meals.

Perhaps you were considering enjoying many of the third party titles now available on Nintendo’s platform, like Elden Ring or Hogwarts Legacy? The only real issue with that, as I’ve been saying for a while because I saw exactly this happen with the Wii U, is that everyone who wanted to play those games has already done so. The Nintendo Switch 2 ports of games are not selling well, which is exactly what one would expect for games that have been available on multiple platforms for several years.

“But… The Switch 2 has a lot of third party support!”

So did the Wii U at launch, which everyone seems to have forgotten. Ubisoft had promised to go all-in the Wii U, just like Capcom had promised with the GameCube. Capcom had promised five GameCube exclusives for the Wii U, and they ultimately delivered 5 games, but only one remained an exclusive. People just weren’t buying games on the platform enough to justify a continued presence. Ubisoft had the same experience with the Wii U, and released games like ZombiU at launch, which remained the best selling third party title on the Wii U for its entire lifespan… at 500,000 copies. Numbers aren’t available for the Switch 2 ports of games, but they’re likely doing about as well as games did on the Wii U.

Even if the Switch 2 can support 4+ year old games, this feat is neither impressive nor enticing. The Switch 2 won’t be capable of running more modern titles like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or the upcoming Game Freak game Beasts of Reincarnation. Nintendo fans are holding out hope for Switch 2 ports of these games, but the publishers are looking at the sales of other Switch 2 party titles, and that makes doing the work an extremely unappealing prospect. If third party games have to be scaled down to run on the inferior hardware (because a game like Clair Obscur is absolutely too much for the Switch 2 to handle without a reduction in graphical fidelity), and then won’t sell very many copies anyway, why bother?

Why Bother, Indeed 

As much as I think gameplay statistics like playtime are a net drag on gaming dialogue, I think it would be valuable here to know exactly how people are spending their time on the Switch 2. I would put my money on Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom comprising the bulk of people’s gameplay, with probably 20-25 hours played on Mario Kart World and Nintendo GameCube games combined. As I thought would happen, people are now playing The Wind Waker and remembering “Oh yeah, this kinda sucks.” Many people are complaining that it isn’t the HD version released for the Wii U, and for some reason they thought that the Wii U version would release onto Nintendo Switch Online onto the GameCube emulator…? I don’t know why they thought that. Good point, though, I guess they should have also put Super Mario All-Stars from the SNES on the NES emulator instead of the original Super Mario Bros. 3. 

Because yeah… that makes sense?

I honestly don’t think very many people really considered the purchase when it came to the Switch 2. Whether FOMO compelled them or a misguided love for a company that exploits their love harsher than any other gaming company out there, people seemed to buy the Switch 2 because it was the latest Nintendo, and that’s that. Now many of them are sitting around watching it collect dust on the shelf, because, other than Mario Kart World, which has no staying power as a gameplay experience outside of the multiplayer, they’ve already played everything the Switch 2 has to offer.

Let’s reflect on that for a moment. As of right now, there are exactly two games available for the Switch 2 that I haven’t already played or can’t play on a platform I already have. And one of those is a glorified tech demo that Nintendo charged $10 for, even though, by all accounts, it should have been bundled with the system. The other is Mario Kart World, which just isn’t the sort of gameplay experience I’m looking to have for a combined price of $500. And you shouldn’t either. And if paying $500 to play Mario Kart World or games you can emulate right now on your phone seems appealing, then I would beg you to raise your standards and demand more of Nintendo.