Tag Archives: Nintendo

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.