Nintendo's dip into smartphone apps has been disappointing. At the beginning they were doing some interesting stuff, like Miitomo which was a simple social-media-like app where you and your friends basically just answered questions if I recall, I had fun with that for a few months. They released Super Mario Run which wasn't really my thing but it was at least a one-time purchase that got you all the content.
But apparently not even Nintendo can overcome the enshittification of mobile app stores, and we have Mario Kart Tour which is just pay-to-win garbage that uses every dirty trick in the book to get your money. They infamously make you do races with fake online players that look like they've been spending money to make you see what you're "missing out on".
Even worse, Tour has infected Nintendo's actually good Mario Kart offering on Switch, with recent DLC packs including courses from Tour which are the most bland, uninspired, and boring courses in the game cause it's always just generic city streets with some Toads standing around in the audience. Obviously they do it because they already have moderately high-quality models of the maps that they can just drag into the game from Tour, as opposed to recreating something from e.g. Mario Kart 64 or Super Mario Kart (SNES) to bring it up to modern standards. Or making something new entirely.
While I agree that their monetisation strategies are garbage, I think the Tour maps ported to Switch are quite good and novel. I prefer them to the rehashed SNES maps.
I find them really badly telegraphed on where you need to turn. They have these transparent walls with arrows that are kind of non-obvious, and sometimes you have to turn at the wall itself, and sometimes the wall is further back from where the road ends and you need to actually turn. I've never had this issue with any other tracks in the game except for the Tour ones, but I'll constantly be driving along and just run into a wall because I didn't know I was supposed to turn.
It's even worse if you're playing split-screen multiplayer with 3 or 4 people and your screen is 1/4 of the TV that's on the other side of the room. It's probably not an issue in Tour where you've got a high-res screen right up close to your face, but it doesn't work on a home console.
The looks don’t fit in with the rest of the game, at least the SNES tracks actually look really good because they completely remodelled them and kept just the layout of the original
I wouldn't say it's all bad on the Tour front, the recent city tracks ported from there to 8 Deluxe are much better now (like Amsterdam, Bangkok and Singapore), and the original tracks made for Tour have been excellent additions for the most part (Ninja Hideaway, Merry Mountain, Yoshi's Island, the not yet in 8 Piranha Plant Cove, etc).
But it's definitely disappointing to see their designs for mobile games be like all the competition sleaziness wise, with their last remaining mobile games being the worst in that regard. Hopefully they'll leave that market soon enough, especially given talk that they didn't find it worth competing in anymore now that the Switch is a huge success.
Really shows how ill the "App Store" model is when a company like Nintendo who has an entire hardware empire off selling high quality non-exploitative games can't make money on it without resorting to gambling industry tactics like the other low quality apps/games on there.
Sad that I had hoped some exec at Nintendo would veto this approach as "Not Nintendo" rather than choosing to tarnish the brand and take the money, like Apple did.
> Sad that I had hoped some exec at Nintendo would veto this approach as "Not Nintendo" rather than choosing to tarnish the brand and take the money, like Apple did.
They did, originally. They released a $10, no microtransactions Mario game (Super Mario Run) in 2016. The general consensus is that the game did not live up to Nintendo's commercial expectations[1], and I think that's true. Nintendo entirely switched to the more standard App Store game model for its later mobile titles, and they print money.
As for "tarnishing the brand," Nintendo still hasn't really put a "full title" on mobile, with the maybe possible exception of Mario Kart. It feels like they are still keeping their distance, but who knows what would have happened if the Switch sales were more like the Wii U than the Wii.
Don't know about anyone else, but the reason I never bought Super Mario Run was because it required a constant internet connection, AND you had to create an account with Nintendo. (At the time, I had an iPod Touch rather than a phone with a cell connection, and usually kept Wi-Fi turned off to save battery, so I only played games that could run offline. So my situation was probably not common, but Nintendo's choices here still feel a bit invasive.)
It's not directly Nintendo, but Pokemon Go is adjacent and is still an absolute cash cow loaded with mobile cancer. Pushing back against that kind of moneymaking potential is quixotic in any corporation.
Yes, I think Nintendo believed they really needed to compete in the mobile space but also didn't want to cannibalize game purchases on their console platforms. Software is their profit center but exclusivity to their hardware gives them much greater control. It also let's them act as a toll collector for anyone else who wants to publish on their platform.
None of this is new information, but a precursor to this point: Nintendo, strategically, couldn't afford (or at least wasn't willing to risk) to develop mobile content on par with the quality of their proprietary hw platforms. Super Mario Run had to be a sub-par experience compared to what was obtainable on their own platform to avoid this risk. Yet they still released a sub-par experience at what, for mobile, was a high premium price of $10. It was doomed to fail from the outset.
They might have maximized the popularity of Mario Run by coming out with a $2-$3 price tag and marketing campaign that essentially gave the message of "Hey this is just a fun little thing we made, hope you enjoy" but that price tag would risk anchoring consumer expectations of the cost of actual premium Nintendo content to a lower benchmark: "Why is Nintendo charging me $40 for New Super Mario Bros. 2 when a similar game (in visual aesthetics only, but still) only costs $3? Ripoff!"
Or at least that might have been their fear at the time. Mario Run appear a in the year prior to the Switch and after the mediocre reception of the Wii U.
The confusing thing to me is that, even after the Switch's success demonstrated the mobile App Store platforms didn't need to be an existential threat, they still went ahead with a freemium lootbox game, or really any freemium game. It's like their still fighting the previous war. Now the emerging mobile war surrounds gaming services that can provide a full console or PC experience on just about any mobile device. I'll lump the Steam Deck in there as part of that war since Steam has demonstrated that really avid gamers are willing to pay to 1) have access to their existing deep library of games and 2) not have to deal with the downsides of streaming. A more casual gamer can get a decent experience streaming w/ Game Pass for $15/month on their phone and/or tablet, a more dedicated gamer might still do that for convenience but can also go for the Deck (or potential competitors) at a price near that of traditional consoles, etc.
There's lots of dust still in the air here that has yet to settle, but Nintendo has yet to show their strategy for this next era of gaming while their current hardware is aging and their gaming service is not only restricted to that hardware but also limited mostly to older games from previous gen consoles.
> Sad that I had hoped some exec at Nintendo would veto this approach as "Not Nintendo"
I'm guessing it happened to a point. King with their Candy Crush saga had higher revenue and profits than Blizzard [1] for a while now. The amount of money mobile gaming pulls is insane. It's hard to leave that on the table.
Luckily this didn't spread beyond their mobile apps, unlike other game developers that push to replicate the model on desktop and consoles.
Candy Crush isn't even top 5 in revenue [0]. Genshin isn't top 10. How can you look at money like that and ever think of going back to the flat fee price model as an executive?
That said, I've wondered why game companies haven't transitioned back to a socialized model where high profit games are used to subsidize the high-intellect games. I'm talking something like 2014 Blizzard where Hearthstone dwarfed the money every other IP was making but which still attracted a higher-end audience with SC2 and WoW.
Does the switch even have the capability to support a mictrotransaction focused shell game? The store is incredibly slow and obtuse, where these things rely a lot on smooth, fast transactions to get it over with before people can think too hard.
> Really shows how ill the "App Store" model is when a company like Nintendo who has an entire hardware empire off selling high quality non-exploitative games can't make money on it without resorting to gambling industry tactics like the other low quality apps/games on there.
Or they're just greedy. They make tons of money running their own walled gardens.
Is it that fascinating? Apple makes 70% of App Store revenue from games. These aren't $2, $10, or $60 games on iOS - they're casino simulators for children. This is pretty apparent, and is one of their biggest criticism
Apple is in for 30% of the take from every single gambling and gacha games, and the take is MASSIVE. They have very strong "incentives" to not have a problem with giving kids gambling games.
Even if the explanation about dopamine receptors is a bit oversimplified, the general insights here were really impressive for 2014. This episode is the first time I had ever been introduced to the concept of "whales" in the context of microtransactions.
I don't like that Nintendo does this. I don't care who does it, it's wrong.
That said, of all the people doing this, it seems to me Nintendo is among the worst targets to go after. They were, to my eye, dragged into this almost against their will, and if anything they've been backing off from it. It certainly hasn't wormed its way in to their mainline games the way it is well into worming its way in to almost every other major publisher out there's games.
Again, I don't say this to defend them. It's wrong for everyone. What I am saying though is that this is not a very target rich environment, and there are target-rich environments elsewhere. There are companies that seem to be entirely based not only on exploitative mechanics, but exploitative mechanics specifically targeted at children, like Roblox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY, the People Make Games investigations into them, for instance.
Although there is an interesting strategy for Nintendo to pursue here where they get sued, and then basically deliberately construct a precedent-setting loss to knee-cap their competition on this front. There's a lot of competition for Nintendo out there surviving on the basis of these cheap drug hits of monetary injection whose ability to develop good games on their own merits are clearly well into the process of atrophy, and Nintendo would probably stand to benefit even if they have to pay some millions of dollars in settlement payouts to impose those restrictions on them. If those mechanics were, for the sake of argument, banned, I think Nintendo would be a big winner in that scenario. Consumers too, for that matter.
Nintendo was not forced to do anything, they chose to do it because it would make a lot of money. The pressure of shareholders is not an excuse to do something potentially illegal.
So why does Nintendo carry extra scrutiny? Well... For one thing, Nintendo has a market cap of around $50 billion USD, which is absurd. The Roblox corporation is already a behemoth at nearly half that. Do they receive scrutiny? Well, yeah. Maybe not as much as deserved, possibly because despite it's prominence a lot of people just don't know what the hell Roblox even is, versus Nintendo which is the closest thing there is to a video game equivalent of Disney. Nonetheless, Roblox is still in the media and in lawsuits all the time.
It's also definitely a strategic choice for people to rally behind a fight with higher stakes, and slapping Nintendo with a lawsuit could have the potential to send a much stronger message than a lawsuit against other prominent game developers like Ubisoft or EA would have.
It's definitely not "fair", per se, if we're trying to rank companies based on how much they've done badly by their customers and the public. However, Nintendo, as beloved as they may be, are absolutely no stranger to engaging in shitty, anti-consumer behavior, so I have a hard time feeling especially much sympathy for them here.
What do you mean "dragged into this against their will"? Who was forcing Nintendo to add lootboxes to their mobile game, or adopt shitty dark patterns to coerce children into buying them?
Their attempts to break into the mobile industry without using these patterns and basically getting their ass handed to them.
The industry, deliberately or otherwise (I honestly don't know), polluted the mobile gaming space and its expectations in a way that made it virtually impossible to sell a conventional $20 game.
It's generally not worthwhile to try to get meaningful answers from someone who drank the Nintendo flavor-aid. Nintendo is a company that willingly chose to produce and monetize their software in this way. Nobody made them do anything. They wanted this, chose this, and brought this sort of thing to market.
They also took your ability to buy their games away (ownership such as it was) and forced you to buy a subscription to their Switch Online program just to own games you've probably already purchased at least once. Anyone that defends their approach is delusional at best.
Unless the kid also plays Roblox and has been a victim of their behavior he can't exactly sue the company behind it though, can he? Whereas if he actually has played the mobile version of Mario Kart he can.
The difficulty with Roblox is that they merely act as a platform. Plenty of their games have some variety of lootbox, but they are created and published on the Roblox platform by 3rd parties with more shallow pockets. Roblox benefits from that game mechanic, but isn't its originator. I'm not saying the exculpates them at all, but it makes the court battle a lot more difficult.
The kid is not important. He is a convenient foil for the lawyers. This is not a bad thing necessarily; of such things are class action lawsuits made. But they can just as easily find someone hurt by Roblox. It wouldn't hardly take them a day.
Indeed if you Google for articles from around a decade ago, Nintendo after it's failed Wii U was especially feeling the heat from the ascendent mobile games industry. Dedicated handhelds game consoles were a dying industry. It was in such an environment that it looked to expand into mobile games, which it stopped further expanding after the success of Switch especially during covid.
I find it hard why chance-based lootboxes are not banned for kids' games. They are basically normalizing gambling at a very young age, with all of the negative potential that that brings.
On the bright side, maybe these gambling things will 'get old'.
I know as an adult, I never got sucked into farmvile, modern call of duty/FPS, or a serious MMO. I played these as a child/teen, I already knew how they worked, nothing interesting. Now the only things that get me going are novel games like Minecraft/Papers Please/etc...
I really hate gambling and I'd love for adults to be bored of it. However I think I know better. Gambling/addictive exploitation might be bad enough to call upon government, however I doubt they will be competent enough to actually remove it.
The fact that they only really pull in people susceptible to gambling addiction makes it worse, not better. If the games were actually fun, but some people just couldn't help but put a thousand dollars into it, maybe it would be harder to justify ending it.
But making a game fun is actually not useful for taking advantage of gambling addicts. They don't get their fix from the game being fun, but rather from having something "at stake". In fact, the things you want to do to better target that dopamine rush tend to make the system a worse "game", as rewards get skewed, incentives get hijacked, and everything else gets a cost associated with it.
They're only purpose is to "mine" the addicts as if they were an oil well.
For anyone interested in understanding more about the context behind this, I recommend checking out this presentation [0] and HN discussion [1] from a little while back.
If nothing is done, lootboxes will become larger than traditional gambling due to the size of the video game market, if it is not already [0]. Taking on Nintendo is the best way to strike the belly of the beast and will set a better precedent than targeting adult-centric games (which are actually played by teens).
[0] US gambling ~$100B, video games ~$60B. But in Vegas the house takes 0.5%-10%, and in loot boxes the house takes 100%
It's not really gambling at all though is it, since as you say 'the house takes 100%' - there's no expectation of (any chance of) profiting from it. It's dumb yes, but it is just paid entertainment; we don't say paying Netflix is gambling ('some months we don't even find something we want to watch!') for example.
I mean, many lootboxes contain things that can be resold for profit... It's just that game devs don't have to "pay out" the winnings, more consumers do. CS skins are the most obvious.
Gacha is definitely gambling even if profit isn't the primary motive. You could argue that profit isn't even the primary motivation of many poker players, but rather being seen as smarter than the next guy or more able to call bullshit.
It’s not even close to Netflix . You paid a 5$ monthly FIXED fee and can watch everything.
Loot boxes on Netflix would be, you have no movies when you start:
You pay 2$ to add Random 3 movies to your library.
Wanna watch Breaking Bad? Pay 2$ until you get “lucky” (and maybe get only Season 3).
Ah, and maybe because it’s premium show, there is only 0.5% chance of getting it in every “loot box”.
So you might spend thousands of dollars, and not get what you want… Because usually there is not even a way to spend 10$ to buy it like a movie on Aplle/Amazon, you have to gamble!
It's not technically gambling, but it's every bit as insidious and preys on the exact same elements of human nature, except we allow it to happen to children.
Does every business model eventually fall into vile recurring payments? Are business that sell a nice thing that you can pay a fair price for once so unattractive to investors now that beloved brands are willing to throw away their reputation nickel and diming customers?
Look at the amount of money made with schemes like this vs. any other gaming business model that has been tried and the answer becomes clear. Even monthly subscriptions (for-pay MMOs) can't complete.
Readit News
But apparently not even Nintendo can overcome the enshittification of mobile app stores, and we have Mario Kart Tour which is just pay-to-win garbage that uses every dirty trick in the book to get your money. They infamously make you do races with fake online players that look like they've been spending money to make you see what you're "missing out on".
Even worse, Tour has infected Nintendo's actually good Mario Kart offering on Switch, with recent DLC packs including courses from Tour which are the most bland, uninspired, and boring courses in the game cause it's always just generic city streets with some Toads standing around in the audience. Obviously they do it because they already have moderately high-quality models of the maps that they can just drag into the game from Tour, as opposed to recreating something from e.g. Mario Kart 64 or Super Mario Kart (SNES) to bring it up to modern standards. Or making something new entirely.
It's even worse if you're playing split-screen multiplayer with 3 or 4 people and your screen is 1/4 of the TV that's on the other side of the room. It's probably not an issue in Tour where you've got a high-res screen right up close to your face, but it doesn't work on a home console.
Anything more reliable than Nintendo resorting to laziness and calling upon nostalgia?
But it's definitely disappointing to see their designs for mobile games be like all the competition sleaziness wise, with their last remaining mobile games being the worst in that regard. Hopefully they'll leave that market soon enough, especially given talk that they didn't find it worth competing in anymore now that the Switch is a huge success.
Sad that I had hoped some exec at Nintendo would veto this approach as "Not Nintendo" rather than choosing to tarnish the brand and take the money, like Apple did.
They did, originally. They released a $10, no microtransactions Mario game (Super Mario Run) in 2016. The general consensus is that the game did not live up to Nintendo's commercial expectations[1], and I think that's true. Nintendo entirely switched to the more standard App Store game model for its later mobile titles, and they print money.
As for "tarnishing the brand," Nintendo still hasn't really put a "full title" on mobile, with the maybe possible exception of Mario Kart. It feels like they are still keeping their distance, but who knows what would have happened if the Switch sales were more like the Wii U than the Wii.
--------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Run#Commercial
None of this is new information, but a precursor to this point: Nintendo, strategically, couldn't afford (or at least wasn't willing to risk) to develop mobile content on par with the quality of their proprietary hw platforms. Super Mario Run had to be a sub-par experience compared to what was obtainable on their own platform to avoid this risk. Yet they still released a sub-par experience at what, for mobile, was a high premium price of $10. It was doomed to fail from the outset.
They might have maximized the popularity of Mario Run by coming out with a $2-$3 price tag and marketing campaign that essentially gave the message of "Hey this is just a fun little thing we made, hope you enjoy" but that price tag would risk anchoring consumer expectations of the cost of actual premium Nintendo content to a lower benchmark: "Why is Nintendo charging me $40 for New Super Mario Bros. 2 when a similar game (in visual aesthetics only, but still) only costs $3? Ripoff!"
Or at least that might have been their fear at the time. Mario Run appear a in the year prior to the Switch and after the mediocre reception of the Wii U.
The confusing thing to me is that, even after the Switch's success demonstrated the mobile App Store platforms didn't need to be an existential threat, they still went ahead with a freemium lootbox game, or really any freemium game. It's like their still fighting the previous war. Now the emerging mobile war surrounds gaming services that can provide a full console or PC experience on just about any mobile device. I'll lump the Steam Deck in there as part of that war since Steam has demonstrated that really avid gamers are willing to pay to 1) have access to their existing deep library of games and 2) not have to deal with the downsides of streaming. A more casual gamer can get a decent experience streaming w/ Game Pass for $15/month on their phone and/or tablet, a more dedicated gamer might still do that for convenience but can also go for the Deck (or potential competitors) at a price near that of traditional consoles, etc.
There's lots of dust still in the air here that has yet to settle, but Nintendo has yet to show their strategy for this next era of gaming while their current hardware is aging and their gaming service is not only restricted to that hardware but also limited mostly to older games from previous gen consoles.
I'm guessing it happened to a point. King with their Candy Crush saga had higher revenue and profits than Blizzard [1] for a while now. The amount of money mobile gaming pulls is insane. It's hard to leave that on the table.
Luckily this didn't spread beyond their mobile apps, unlike other game developers that push to replicate the model on desktop and consoles.
[1] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/84423/king-has-made-more-mone...
That said, I've wondered why game companies haven't transitioned back to a socialized model where high profit games are used to subsidize the high-intellect games. I'm talking something like 2014 Blizzard where Hearthstone dwarfed the money every other IP was making but which still attracted a higher-end audience with SC2 and WoW.
[0]https://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/news-genshin-impact-amon...
Or they're just greedy. They make tons of money running their own walled gardens.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/apple-vs-epic-70percent-of-a...
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/05/05/apple-arcade-ne...
But yeah, the (monetization) design of Nintendo’s mobile games is quite disappointing.
The App Store and exploitative the models it's design perpetuates.
The scene in which Satan explains brain chemistry to Stan is well worth watching: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B29YStCYorY
I bet it has aged fairly well.
Deleted Comment
That said, of all the people doing this, it seems to me Nintendo is among the worst targets to go after. They were, to my eye, dragged into this almost against their will, and if anything they've been backing off from it. It certainly hasn't wormed its way in to their mainline games the way it is well into worming its way in to almost every other major publisher out there's games.
Again, I don't say this to defend them. It's wrong for everyone. What I am saying though is that this is not a very target rich environment, and there are target-rich environments elsewhere. There are companies that seem to be entirely based not only on exploitative mechanics, but exploitative mechanics specifically targeted at children, like Roblox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY, the People Make Games investigations into them, for instance.
Although there is an interesting strategy for Nintendo to pursue here where they get sued, and then basically deliberately construct a precedent-setting loss to knee-cap their competition on this front. There's a lot of competition for Nintendo out there surviving on the basis of these cheap drug hits of monetary injection whose ability to develop good games on their own merits are clearly well into the process of atrophy, and Nintendo would probably stand to benefit even if they have to pay some millions of dollars in settlement payouts to impose those restrictions on them. If those mechanics were, for the sake of argument, banned, I think Nintendo would be a big winner in that scenario. Consumers too, for that matter.
So why does Nintendo carry extra scrutiny? Well... For one thing, Nintendo has a market cap of around $50 billion USD, which is absurd. The Roblox corporation is already a behemoth at nearly half that. Do they receive scrutiny? Well, yeah. Maybe not as much as deserved, possibly because despite it's prominence a lot of people just don't know what the hell Roblox even is, versus Nintendo which is the closest thing there is to a video game equivalent of Disney. Nonetheless, Roblox is still in the media and in lawsuits all the time.
It's also definitely a strategic choice for people to rally behind a fight with higher stakes, and slapping Nintendo with a lawsuit could have the potential to send a much stronger message than a lawsuit against other prominent game developers like Ubisoft or EA would have.
It's definitely not "fair", per se, if we're trying to rank companies based on how much they've done badly by their customers and the public. However, Nintendo, as beloved as they may be, are absolutely no stranger to engaging in shitty, anti-consumer behavior, so I have a hard time feeling especially much sympathy for them here.
The industry, deliberately or otherwise (I honestly don't know), polluted the mobile gaming space and its expectations in a way that made it virtually impossible to sell a conventional $20 game.
They also took your ability to buy their games away (ownership such as it was) and forced you to buy a subscription to their Switch Online program just to own games you've probably already purchased at least once. Anyone that defends their approach is delusional at best.
This might be the only thing that US Sen. Josh Hawley from Missouri and I agree on, given his sponsorship of S.1629: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/162...
I feel the same way, and it's why I won't allow my kids to play any games that include loot boxes. I never play such games myself either.
I'm hoping that the EU legislates against this, which in turn I hope causes others to follow suit.
I know as an adult, I never got sucked into farmvile, modern call of duty/FPS, or a serious MMO. I played these as a child/teen, I already knew how they worked, nothing interesting. Now the only things that get me going are novel games like Minecraft/Papers Please/etc...
I really hate gambling and I'd love for adults to be bored of it. However I think I know better. Gambling/addictive exploitation might be bad enough to call upon government, however I doubt they will be competent enough to actually remove it.
But making a game fun is actually not useful for taking advantage of gambling addicts. They don't get their fix from the game being fun, but rather from having something "at stake". In fact, the things you want to do to better target that dopamine rush tend to make the system a worse "game", as rewards get skewed, incentives get hijacked, and everything else gets a cost associated with it.
They're only purpose is to "mine" the addicts as if they were an oil well.
[0] https://growth.design/case-studies/mario-kart-revenue-model
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35058744
[0] US gambling ~$100B, video games ~$60B. But in Vegas the house takes 0.5%-10%, and in loot boxes the house takes 100%
Gacha is definitely gambling even if profit isn't the primary motive. You could argue that profit isn't even the primary motivation of many poker players, but rather being seen as smarter than the next guy or more able to call bullshit.
Loot boxes on Netflix would be, you have no movies when you start:
You pay 2$ to add Random 3 movies to your library. Wanna watch Breaking Bad? Pay 2$ until you get “lucky” (and maybe get only Season 3).
Ah, and maybe because it’s premium show, there is only 0.5% chance of getting it in every “loot box”.
So you might spend thousands of dollars, and not get what you want… Because usually there is not even a way to spend 10$ to buy it like a movie on Aplle/Amazon, you have to gamble!