Phil Spencer: "getting [acquiring] Nintendo would be a career moment for me"; Nintendo's future "exists off of their own hardware"
Phil Spencer: "getting [acquiring] Nintendo would be a career moment for me"; Nintendo's future "exists off of their own hardware"
This comes from the FTC document leak. source
![Phil Spencer: "getting [acquiring] Nintendo would be a career moment for me"; Nintendo's future "exists off of their own hardware"](https://lemdro.id/pictrs/image/90a0676a-93b5-429d-94ac-db4da0b85acc.png?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
Archive link: https://archive.ph/NF2r0
At some point, getting Nintendo would be a career moment and I honestly believe a good move for both companies. It's just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time.... :-)
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Boy would I love to see Nintendo's future in the hands of anyone except Nintendo. That's the only way their future will be off their own hardware, and probably the only way they become less of a barrier to game preservation. For those of you afraid of Microsoft absorbing Nintendo and becoming a monopoly, check the date on that e-mail and rest assured they can't get away with it anymore anyway.
@ampersandrew @UrLogicFails for better or worse Nintendo does things their own way. You can bet you'd see yearly mario kart releases if that IP belonged to anyone else, and I don't think that would be for the better.
Is that the worst thing you can think of? Because that sounds like more than an acceptable trade if it meant that I could legally buy a ROM of Super Metroid I could play on my Steam Deck, or if I could legally play Tears of the Kingdom on a machine that can run it at 60 FPS, or if the first F-Zero game made in 20 years wasn't a live service battle royale with an expiration date baked into the game.
@ampersandrew @UrLogicFails worst thing I could think of would be yearly bland releases barely worth playing and gutting the innovation they bring.
It's not like every release is brilliant or great (looking at you pokemon violet/scarlet), but look at what happened to Blizzard pre and post acquisition.
I already think Mario Kart is bland and not worth playing, so you'll need a harder sell for me. Also, the yearly release model is just about dead these days; very few can pull it off still, and it tends to not be as lucrative as just making DLC for one major version at a time, like Nintendo is already doing now with Mario Kart. The truth is, at this point, I don't care what kind of quality Nintendo's games are made with if they're sticking to the business practices they're using currently. I haven't bought Tears of the Kingdom or even pirated it. My time and money are better spent with companies making better products.
@ampersandrew @UrLogicFails better is subjective for sure. But if you got a list of better games I can play with my 5 year old, I'm honestly all ears. So far nothing is beating Mario Odyssey and Pokémon Eevee.
Preservation wise and business practice wise I'm also not sure of anyone is 'good', but I'd again be more than happy to be better educated on the subject.
You can sit a 5 year old in front of all sorts of games that they'd enjoy, but Mario and Pokemon is what they've been exposed to, by you or friends or both. You'll have a difficult time arguing with them over the importance of how your individual market actions have lasting effects on what gets produced; that's true. But Nintendo only has a monopoly on marketing kid-friendly games, not producing them...not that that will matter to your 5 year old.
As for preservation, server dependencies are bad. F-Zero 99 requires a server and a subscription to be played, full stop. That game will not survive, and other battle royales or even other "99" games are already being decommissioned and will cease to exist. Online multiplayer can still exist without server dependencies, via private servers or LAN or direct IP connection; these features are becoming increasingly rare for business reasons, so keep your eye out for them. Without these features, multiplayer will disappear at some point. DRM is bad. While it often doesn't bother people who purchase legitimately, sometimes it does, including long after the initial release period, if that DRM hasn't been patched out, because the company authorizing the DRM usually doesn't care about the repercussions of it two decades from now. Baldur's Gate 3, not a game to play with your 5 year old for at least another decade, has all of those multiplayer features and is available DRM-free. BG3 will be preserved. The gold standard for preservation is open source, where anyone can view the code and change it, which means it will always run on whatever computers we use in the future. This is why Doom is ported to everything with a screen and an input device. But open sourcing your game is a hard sell for developers.
@ampersandrew @UrLogicFails okay but how is Nintendo worse than other companies in that regard? Is microsoft or Sony better at the preservation than them in some way I don't understand? Are they better companies to support in that metric?
As for the kid thing, they don't really get much pick in the matter of what game I let them try yet. It's just that I can't FIND any games outside of Nintendos stuff that is quality and fun for the family. It's mostly poor quality IP tie ins. I've looked!
how is Nintendo worse than other companies in that regard? Is microsoft or Sony better at the preservation than them in some way I don't understand? Are they better companies to support in that metric?
Both of them make PC ports now, which are automatically better for preservation, since PC is an open platform rather than a walled garden. Neither is perfect. They both put out live service games that are bad for preservation. But Microsoft especially is better at making their back catalog available for purchase years and years after release. Nintendo hunts down ROM sites and gets them shut down but won't make their old games available in a state that their potential customers are willing to pay for them.
As for the kid thing, they don't really get much pick in the matter of what game I let them try yet. It's just that I can't FIND any games outside of Nintendos stuff that is quality and fun for the family. It's mostly poor quality IP tie ins. I've looked!
- Cassette Beasts (like Pokemon)
- Lego \
- Overcooked and Overcooked 2 (it could be difficult for your kid at 5, but it might also be fun to play together depending on how they take to it)
- Penny's Big Breakaway (upcoming, from the Sonic Mania team; 3D platformer)
- Poi (I have no experience with this one myself, but I hear positive comparisons to Super Mario 64)
- Sonic + All-Stars Racing Transformed
- Sonic Mania
- Do the kids still like Spongebob? There's that new Spongebob: The Cosmic Shake. That one's licensed, but I hear it's quality enough. It's also a 3D platformer.
- Stardew Valley
- Yooka-Laylee (admittedly, this one got middling reviews, but I liked it more than most people; 3D platformer)
Permanently Deleted
Random game suggestion: Luigi's Mansion 3 is a great coop game that I'm sure you and your daughter would love
Not even Microsoft is selling ROMs, at most they make their older games retrocompatible on console. From one locked device to another. At that point you might as well dump your old Nintendo games and the result is the same.
Their new games come out on PC day and date, and they haven't released a console-only game since Rare Replay, if I'm not mistaken. "ROMs" are a little before Microsoft's time, if we're being honest.
Sure, but if you are talking about Super Metroid ROMs, you are talking legacy releases, and Microsoft didn't bother to rerelease their classic XBox games on PC, so there's no reason to assume they would do it to SNES games if they acquired Nintendo.
Well, there is, because SNES emulation is trivial, and Xbox emulation is much less so. Great SNES emulation is available open source and in many different flavors with many different features, and all you need to do is supply the ROM, preferably in a legal way. Most of Xbox's best games already have PC ports, and Microsoft's shift to supporting PC equally is as recent as only a handful of years ago. Especially in the interest of making the Game Pass offering more uniform across PC and Xbox, they still may yet backport those remaining Xbox games to PC in some way just like they ported Age of Empires II to console. Meanwhile, I have no prayer of Nintendo releasing their games on an open platform like PC unless they have an extreme change of leadership or another extreme failure in the market akin to the Wii U.
The newer XBox consoles are x86 architecture devices with an operating system that is similar to Windows. If they can maintain retrocompatibility with older titles, that means they have a functioning emulator or compatibility layer for classic XBox and 360 games. It would be trivial for Microsoft to release them for PC but they don't seem interested in doing that. Whatever obstacles there may be there, they are not technical. Considering that, it's unlikely that they would take a different approach regarding older Nintendo titles.
The example of Age of Empires II if anything indicates that they want to have a console-centric approach towards older titles. So, it's just speculation to assume that Microsoft acquiring Nintendo would lead to their games being ported to PC. On the flipside, I'd be more concerned that Microsoft's more inconsistent quality standards and monetization tendencies would make their way into Nintendo titles.
If they can maintain retrocompatibility with older titles, that means they have a functioning emulator or compatibility layer for classic XBox and 360 games. It would be trivial for Microsoft to release them for PC but they don't seem interested in doing that.
It also isn't trivial. They had to write custom emulation code for those old games, and they had to negotiate that with the rights holders in a lot of cases.
On the flipside, I'd be more concerned that Microsoft's more inconsistent quality standards and monetization tendencies would make their way into Nintendo titles.
Right, as opposed to the flawless technical quality of the latest Pokemon games and the impeccable business model of tying games with a killswitch behind a subscription model?
I'll just say again that, for me personally, I'd rather see almost anyone else run Nintendo, because they're a good chance I'd find that entity to be less shitty. But maybe the better alternative is for them to just screw up the successor to the Switch and take a bath on it financially.
It also isn't trivial. They had to write custom emulation code for those old games, and they had to negotiate that with the rights holders in a lot of cases.
All that applies to Nintendo titles, especially the latter. If they don't manage it for the titles they already have for which they already did the technical work, Nintendo on PC seems even more unlikely.
Right, as opposed to the flawless technical quality of the latest Pokemon games and the impeccable business model of tying games with a killswitch behind a subscription model?
I expected for you to bring up Pokémon, and in all fairness I agree that it was released in an unacceptable state. But I should remind you that The Pokémon Company and Game Freak are separate companies that work differently than other first-party Nintendo titles. Could you honestly tell me that Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Animal Crossing and all other Nintendo franchises are anything but excellent? People may have their preferences and dislikes about them, but it would be dishonest to say they aren't all finely crafted.
I agree with you as far as their attitude towards Mario 35, but what do you think is going to happen to Sea of Thieves once they decide to take the servers down? This is not something that Microsoft is going to fix, it's the pitfall of all live service games, and as time goes by gaming companies only seem to insist more on this direction.
I don't agree with Nintendo with everything, their online platforms are lacking, their closedness is disappointing, their litigiousness is often revolting, but I definitely wouldn't trust Microsoft or Sony to do better, even less any other gaming company.
I can tell you that I find the frame rate and resolution of Zelda to be unacceptable, given that they don't allow any option for that game to run on other hardware, legally. I've heard enough complaints from my girlfriend to know how little they cared about Animal Crossing in the online experience (a minute and a half connection screen every time someone joins your island!) or the UX (manually hitting A over and over to craft something thirty times that you should be able to do in bulk). Smash's online could have been done right this time, but they took the cheap way out instead of properly developing it with rollback. Their voice chat solution is to hook up your phone with an app and use it separately rather than baking it into the device's OS. I would call all of these poor quality and unacceptable.
I agree with you as far as their attitude towards Mario 35, but what do you think is going to happen to Sea of Thieves once they decide to take the servers down? This is not something that Microsoft is going to fix, it's the pitfall of all live service games, and as time goes by gaming companies only seem to insist more on this direction.
So then why does Microsoft frighten you when Nintendo already does the shitty thing of their own accord? The stuff they do with their online catalogue of retro games is the shitty thing no one else is doing. Remember that Microsoft had a great remaster of Goldeneye ready to go for 360 that Nintendo denied in the 11th hour, and when that game finally came out again, it's only available in subscription services rather than for purchase, both the Switch and Xbox versions were worse than that remaster, and only the Switch version had online play.
The only reason I trust Microsoft and Sony to do better, even by a smidge, is because they actually respond to market forces, and Nintendo would rather go bankrupt than sell you a ROM of Super Mario Bros. for $8 on PC. But Microsoft isn't acquiring them anyway. Buying Activision closed that door, so all of this is moot.
All that applies to Nintendo titles, especially the latter. If they don't manage it for the titles they already have for which they already did the technical work, Nintendo on PC seems even more unlikely.
True, but Nintendo's consoles already had working FOSS emulators out there they can study. We're still working on the 'working' part when it comes to Xbox OG emulation
You really think M$ is better about this? You still can't play any Forza Motorsport games on back compat, there may be some technical reason for this, but I doubt it. They delist games before the next one in the series comes out too, which is the wildest shit. you can't buy FM7 anymore and haven't been able to for a while. The new one isn't even out yet.
This practice boggles the mind because I can go on Steam and most publishers are still selling their decade + old games.
That one's on car manufacturers. Anyone that licenses real cars deals with the same nonsense. Those games in particular are not built to be sold forever, perhaps because car manufacturers only want you to think about the new models. It's also probably a factor in why the upcoming Forza is built as a "live service" that will keep getting updated, though I suspect that means old cars get removed in favor of their new models somehow.
You mean we won't have to buy ewaste electronics to play Mario Kart? Sign me up.
Realistically though, I'd bet on a "Mario Kart Mushroom Kingdom Racing" release (or something) that would just be a cross platform live service.
... and honestly I'll take that any day over Nintendo, which I've given $0 in over a decade because I refuse to buy their ewaste. I would love to have their games on PC though.
@Dark_Arc weirdly all my old consoles and games work. I've definitely made more e-waste from PC and upgrades over the years than consoles. (let's not talk about phones...)
PC parts can be reused and resold until they're irrelevant. Decades old PC software can run on the latest hardware (often much better than it did on its original hardware).
Meanwhile, consoles do one job only, play games. If something breaks, more often than not you get an entirely new console; maybe the manufacturer actually fixes your old one (if they're still working on it).
They also lose security updates and become opportunities for botnets to infect and exploit. No device should be used past its end of software life that's connected to the Internet. Regardless of that, many people do continue to use old consoles and smart phones that are long past their socially responsible expiration date.
Beyond that, if someone has a computer capable of playing a game, to force them to buy a different piece of hardware is by definition unnecessary ewaste.
Decades old PC software can run on the latest hardware (often much better than it did on its original hardware).
This is increasingly less true as the software dependencies get more complicated. See also, Rockstar selling pirated games because that was the way to get it running...
Window's compatibility layer is still far beyond what a console provides. Beyond that, WINE (for Linux) is increasingly able to run Windows programs from many decades... In a sense, Linux is becoming the best Windows compatibility layer for old software and games in the world.
You don't need to reach 100% to provide value/be better.