• Katana314@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    My line in the sand was when Nintendo went after GMod hosting of their character models.

    When they go after emulators, I was upset but at least acknowledge there’s an economic relation there - and there’s some legal basis for protecting their copyright (even if the emulator itself is technically outside their rights).

    But taking down models used solely for fan creations is just pointlessly mean. No developer I know is upset about people putting up animations of their game protagonists doing silly shit like slipping on banana peels or getting blown up.

    • scala@lemmy.ml
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      6 days ago

      Even before that. Nintendo went after small time Smash Bros tournaments. Giving them CND. Never gave them a cent after that, and I didn’t even play in those tourneys

  • NoodlePoint@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    That corporation is still operating as if they’re in the 80s, going by their “good old Showa values”: heavy-handed proprietary control of their content and platforms, while making heavy use of nostalgia and its properties to keep the money coming in from casual gamers.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
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    7 days ago

    Two decades from now, people will talk about how Nintendo managed to ruin itself, from a gaming behemoth to some gacha subsidiary bought for a single yen.

    • rozodru@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Nintendo has ALWAYS been like this. The SNES could easily play games from Japan on the NA console. But Nintendo wouldn’t allow it. how? look at a North American SNES cartridge. notice those notches on the bottom? inside the console where you plug the cartridge in you’ll see two pegs for where it connects to said cartridge. just little plastic pegs. Japanese Super Famicom carts didn’t have this. So how do you play Japanese games on your US SNES? remove those pegs.

      you remove those little plastic pegs and suddenly your SNES is region free.

      • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
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        7 days ago

        I worded it in a dumb/certain/silly way but, unless drastic changes happen, I do find it likely to happen.

        Look at how often Nintendo is surfacing negatively on the news:

        • harassing a small dev studio over patents,
        • trying to kill emulation while profiting off it,
        • bricking hardware already sold to customers,
        • demanding unreasonable prices for new games,
        • dictating if you shall be allowed to feature one of its games in a speedrunning event…

        Nintendo stopped being seen as a company that enables your fun, to become one that gatekeeps it. That’s brand damage - and really bad for Nintendo’s console sales; people are only willing to invest in a console if they’re reasonably certain they can have fun with it.

        And at the same time, there are voices within and around Nintendo pushing the company towards the mobile market. Remember Pokémon Go? Or Ishihara saying the Switch 1 would flop, because of smartphones? If Nintendo console sales decline meaningfully, those voices will become louder and louder. Eventually Nintendo will focus primarily on the mobile market.

        However people don’t typically buy mobile games; the monetisation strategy is completely different - microtransactions, gacha, lootboxes, all that crap. Most players (the “minnows”) won’t drop a penny on the game, but huge spenders (the “whales”) compensate for that, so it works.

        The minnows aren’t just freeloaders, mind you; they’re required to keep the game alive. So mobile game companies need to fine-tune the pressure in their games - it should be just enough to encourage people to spend some money on the game, but not enough to shoo the minnows away.

        But we’re talking about Nintendo here. A company willing to damage its own brand for a few additional pennies. Nintendo would not be able to see all those minnows and say “hey, that’s cool”, it would go full “ARE THOSE FREELOADERS STUPID? DON’T THEY KNOW THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BUY STUFF?”. It would tune the pressure way up, and ruin its mobile market, after it ruined its console market.

        …perhaps it should go back to selling playing cards.

    • misk@piefed.socialOP
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      7 days ago

      Nintendo sits on a load of hard cash and has Apple-like profit margins. They’re not going away anytime soon and I think that’s for the best. They’re one of the last AAA publishers focused on innovation in gameplay which is why I can forgive them being mildly brain damaged sometimes.

      • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
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        7 days ago

        No load of hard cash is large enough to allow a company to systematically screw things up; specially not under an economic system that equates “stable profits” with “failure to grow”.

        And Nintendo’s actions aren’t the result of [metaphorical] brain damage; there’s a consistent pattern here of exploiting brand value for short-term profit.

        • misk@piefed.socialOP
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          7 days ago

          I’ve read that with current Nintendo finances they can afford to not make any profit for something like 10 or 20 years. I genuinely think that they’re not as much as malicious as they are stuck in very outdated thinking that’s prevalent in Japanese business. They don’t get any short term profit from things like this.

        • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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          6 days ago

          Nintendo doesn’t work like your typical western companies where failing to increase profit each quarter = death (investment funds like blackrock play a big part in this, but that’s a different story).

          They have a number of mobile games, but they don’t invest heavily on those, despite said games being high earners - Fire Emblem Heroes’ revenue has decreased consistently year by year, but still brought in ~48mil dollars in 2024. If anything, that’s proof that they are not exploiting brand value for short-term profit. Their problem is a brain-damaged overzealous protection of their IP, which isn’t uncommon in Japan: Johnny and Associates controlled with an iron fist all the photos and videos that could or could not be shown of idols under their management

  • x00z@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    And when I thought Nintendo couldn’t get any lower it just does it again.

    • Coskii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      6 days ago

      It would be incredible if somehow every streamer and tuber just stopped broadcasting anything Nintendo, which seems to be something Nintendo wants. I wonder how much of a hit they’d take without those content creators.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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      6 days ago

      They will keep doing it at each and every opportunity they get, even if they have to create new opportunities to do it, they will do so, always. They have already shown who they are.

    • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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      7 days ago

      Because they operate on a very outdated understanding of how the world works. In their mind they own the games, they made them after all. The people “buying” the games don’t really buy them, they just get a copy of the software and the license to use that copy. That license is limited in what you can and can’t do. You can play them by yourself in your own home. You can even play with other people if they are physically in your own home. However if you want to do anything beyond that, it’s outside of the license and thus not allowed. If you want to put on an event featuring their games, you need to apply for a license to do so and probably pay Nintendo for that license. Nintendo wants to limit the license even further lately, limiting playing inside your own home to their rules and limiting resale of the game (license).

      This may sound crazy, and it is, however this is very much how music still works. And how movies and TV series used to work, and partly still do. It’s a limited license for enjoying the media in your own home only. Technically when you throw a party, you would have to apply for a license to play the music you already own. When money is involved, like a bigger event and you don’t play by their rules, expect to get sued. This is why the entertainment industry is so huge and the people in the top make so much money.

      In the West we’ve accepted this doesn’t apply to video games for the most part. Copying the game is a no-go, but using a game for entertainment purposes is allowed. When a streamer plays a game, they add enough of their own value for it not to be considered a violation. Even at large events, it’s usually allowed. Although depending on the context, often license deals are made for the really big events.

      There’s gray areas as well, such as game modding or using the assets of a game to create a new game. This is also usually accepted, with services like Steam activily supporting mods and such. Most game devs like it when a community forms around their games and support mods. But not Nintendo, they hate this. They go after anyone doing this. Famously almost destroying the careers of people playing modded Nintendo games for entertainment. (Especially SMW romhacks). And people have to go through all sorts of hoops not to attract the eye of Nintendo (like how Ship of Harkinian does things). Another gray area is music in video games, usually that music has a rather open license. But not always and services like Twitch have made deals with the music industry in order to keep existing. That means upholding things like DMCA and muting or even disabling videos which contain copyrighted music. One recent example of this is Death Stranding, which contains so much copyrighted music it’s problematic for everyone involved.

      It has taken a very long time for the music industry to get around to the concept of streaming music. And even then the license is super limited and people don’t own the music they pay for. Same for movies, TV series and other media. It has made them rich for decades, why give that up? Nintendo has always had the same mindset when it comes to video games and aren’t going to change.

      Personally I don’t know why we put up with the BS system for music and other media. Especially the length of time for copyright these days. But large companies like Disney have so much power, it isn’t going to change quickly. I feel the only reason we have music streaming at all is because the piracy got so bad they had to. And even then they fought it hard, demanding tens of thousands of dollars from little Timmy who downloaded a Metallica song.

    • Atomic@sh.itjust.works
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      7 days ago

      Probably because a lot of nintendo games are speedrun on emulators. Since it can be difficult to attain region specific hardware and cartridges that are optimal for speedrunning, they resort to emulators so the barrier of entry isn’t unreasonable.

      And we all know how Nintendo feels about emulators.

      Not to say it explains how it benefits Nintendo. But it explains why they’re going this route.

    • Chloé 🥕@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 days ago

      nintendo wants total, and I mean TOTAL control over their IP. not a smidge must escape their grasp.

      if they could take down every fanart and every meme with their IP in it, they would

    • artyom@piefed.social
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      6 days ago

      They want these people to license the rights to play the game at events, etc. Like showing a movie or a sports game.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Aim at foot, pull trigger. What company lets such an opportunity of free showcasing and advertizing run through their fingers?

  • thesmokingman@programming.dev
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    7 days ago

    The most shocking thing to me is that they’re going to feature Nintendo games in the future. I wouldn’t want to jump through all of those hoops just to possibly be rejected or have the content taken down arbitrarily in the future when Nintendo is feeling capricious. That’s a huge investment for very poor expected value.