So... Do We Hate Nintendo or Not?

Nintendo Direct has rolled around once again, with a mixture of interesting announcements as expected.

We have an interesting relationship with Nintendo here in the Fediverse. Pretty much every person here has a core childhood memory of a Nintendo game. For me, it's Pokemon Crystal. For others it's the Mario games, or Metroid, Legend of Zelda or anything in between.

But Nintendo time and time again seems to make some poor choices when it comes gamers and the gaming community.

Back in 2013, Nintendo was claiming full monetisation rights on YouTube videos featuring Nintendo games, essentially meaning that anyone publishing a Nintendo video to YouTube was working for Nintendo for free. They later relented and reduced the cut to 40%, but required content creators to submit every Nintendo video they created for approval.

This arrangement lasted until 2018, when the company finally relented and removed the requirement to submit videos for review and surrender revenue share. Some weird guidelines remained however, requiring content creators to provide commentary or otherwise transform the content sufficiently. When I'm consuming video game let's play content and the like, I like commentary, sure. But no commentary long play videos are a genre in themselves, and plenty of people enjoy them, too.

To this day, the Nintendo Game Content Guidelines for Online Video & Image Sharing Platforms document still states:

Videos and images that contain mere copies of Nintendo Game Content without creative input or commentary are not permitted.

Nintendo frequently take actions that, while largely within their rights, are nonetheless a bit crap. They have a zero-tolerance approach to any sort of fan games, remakes or mods.

Ahead of the release of the Switch 2, Nintendo's Terms of Service were updated to essentially give them the right to brick a customer's console if they believe they may be acting against their terms. It raises questions around whether a customer who has purchased a physical item owns the item or not, or just a revocable license to use it.

Nintendo's patent grant on the "summoning sub-characters and battling them" feature they've been using for 20 years in games is another one that gives me a little bit of the ick toward them.

So where do we sit with Nintendo these days? I absolutely understand the reasonable concerns people have over Nintendo's behaviour in the recent past. I'm personally neutral on the whole thing. I just care all that much about them these days. Maybe I'll buy a Switch 2 eventually, maybe I won't.

On another subject, we've had a few outages of the magazine over the last week which are linked to some more general infrastructure issues effecting all of the Fediverse.Games services - I apologise if you've faced any issues accessing the magazine, but we should be back on a better track moving forward.