If Nintendo went belly up today the retro community would have a field day
If Nintendo went belly up today the retro community would have a field day
If Nintendo went belly up today, Microsoft would buy them.
That’d be kind of sad.
Literally had to check to make sure I was in the Nintendo thread when I read your comment.
That being said, what the fuuuuuck are you on about?
Yeah I don’t know about that. A company with that much IP would just sell rights to the highest bidder and stay afloat for ages. If Nintendo sells even just one of their main franchises like Mario, Zelda, Pokémon etc they’re gonna be fine for a long time and someone else is gonna sue the emulator guys all the same.
For example Sega, who went basically belly-up decades ago just sued Memento Mori devs for copyright infringement of in-game mechanics.
The Switch is fantastic for what it is. Sure, it’s anemic and old, but it’s a creative design that more or less created a whole product category and allows for very creative gameplay.
They did push their luck a bit with BOTW and especially TOTK, regarding performance, sure. But most of the time, you really don’t need incredible processing power to play a Nintendo game.
IMO Nintendo brings something different and it’s very much okay that it exists.
What I’m actually doubtful about is Xbox and Sony. Those are just PC-controller combos, made cheap through standardisation, high volumes and loss-leader tactics, essentially. Microsoft and, to a lesser but similar degree, Sony, are the ones I’m not convinced provide the world with much value by making consoles.
The Switch is fantastic for what it is. Sure, it’s anemic and old, but it’s a creative design that more or less created a whole product category and allows for very creative gameplay.
This is actually their design philosophy: “Lateral thinking with withered technology,” or, “what can we do with old technology we’re really familiar with?” Nintendo was much slower to market with their 16 bit console than Sega, but they took their time to understand the new tech, and developed the first handheld cartridge console with 8 bit technology at the same time. Sega tried to emulate its success with a color handheld system, but it was large, had poor battery life, and didn’t sell very well. Instead of rushing to catch up with a color handheld, Nintendo released the Game Boy Pocket, which was very popular. and released an entirely superior product in the Game Boy Color a few years later.
This philosophy isn’t always a benefit to them; they lost the Final Fantasy franchise because the cartridge system on the N64 wasn’t powerful enough to run it. However, it’s usually a boon; the switch has been incredibly successful despite its graphical inferiority, and despite being comically underpowered compared to its competitors, the Wii is the secon-best selling console of all time, behind only the PS2.
I feel like you get to have the odd “failed” console as long as the next one is a smash hit.
Sega had the Saturn and then the Dreamcast just before it was steamrollered by the PS2.
Nintendo had Gamecube not do so well, the Wii was a smash hit, the Wii U again did badly, then the Switch blew it all away again. They’ve found their niche. The Steamdeck is poking around in there, but I doubt it will get the traction Nintendo have.
MS are at their second duffer in a row, and frankly it looks like they’ll drop out in the future to me. They’re starting to be about games rather than hardware, even if it’s just to try and push subscriptions. The great cloud migration never happened for them. I think they’ll go pure publisher in future, even if they hold onto Game Pass.
Sony only really had a disappointment with the PS3. Every other generation has handily destroyed all competition. Even they’re doing a lot of PC ports which is nice.
Can you imagine a word without lawyers?
They killed yuzu and ryujinx well before Switch 2 launch out of fear of piracy. Even the current switch DRM is insane. I feel like they put their dev team into full security because the OS is still an empty shell glorified game launcher. The DS had more features than this.
Even the yuzu forks can’t exist peacefully online, one them literally requires you to use Tor to access.
Nintendo is insane.
They plan to announce it before April and have already sent out Dev kits: