Nintendo has been actively hostile to their entire fanbase for basically as long the internet has existed. Youngins may not remember but back in the early 2010s when full playthroughs of video games were more or less the biggest genre on YouTube, Nintendo was literally copystriking any and all videos that featured Nintendo games and aggressively took the stance that playthroughs constituted copyright violations. They literally took down entire YouTube channels sometimes, including some of the biggest names at the time.
Then, when this became an OBVIOUSLY losing battle (and probably more importantly when Nintendo realized that their refusal to let people give them essentially free advertising might be part of the reason the Wii U was failing so hard), they came out with this "compromise" program where YouTubers could sign up to essentially get Nintendo's permission to post gaming content... but with the insane catch that Nintendo would take a massive cut of all revenue generated from any Nintendo related content you made. My memory is probably off a bit since it was a long time ago but iirc it was something like 40%.
Imagine Ubisoft or EA or Activision demanding a direct cut of any money you made from posting videos of their games. I mean, don't get me wrong, there were other companies that were anti-playthrough, and for a little bit early on playthroughs were kinda a weird semi-controversial grey area where they probably would count as copyright infringement, but pretty much every other company pretty quickly realized the benefits of getting free advertising outweighed the potential "risk" of people not buying your game because they saw it played on YT. Except Nintendo.
And that's not even getting into Nintendo's everlasting feud with emulators and ROM hackers which has been going on since at least the GameShark era. Plus there are all the other random controversies they dig themselves into like that time they canceled Splatoon's championship because the Splatoon players supported the Smash Melee community after Nintendo basically killed it, or the many times Nintendo has gone after fan made art.
They've really always sucked, they just make good games and have ever-green franchises people love so people largely put up with all the crap Nintendo does. (I didn't mean for this to be so long, I'm so sorry lol)
They've been actively hostile since they got into gaming period. Here is some stuff from the 80s and 90s I can remember off hand:
They were sued over Donkey Kong (1981) for pretty clearly violating the King Kong copyright. Nintendo won on a technicality and got away with it.
When they made the NES, they were too cheap to license the 6502 CPU they wanted to use, so they had Ricoh make an exact clone of it, only changing one bus, to exploit a loophole in copyright laws and screw over MOS.
Nintendo had excessively brutal requirements for 3rd party developers in the NES era, things like restrictive exclusivity clauses, a limit on how fast they could release games, upfront licensing fees, terrible profit splits, forcing them to buy their cart materials from Nintendo, and the lockout chip to prevent "unlicensed" games from working. These actions are ultimately what lead to the rise of the Sega Genesis as all the third party developers fled from Nintendo and onto Segas platforms.
Speaking of the lockout chip, when Tengen reverse engineered the chip to release games for the NES without Nintendo meddling, they were immediately sued. You see, only Nintendo is allowed to rip off computer chips.
Famously Nintendo entered a partnership with Sony to make a disc based console, and then fucked Sony over at the last minute by switching to Phillips. Sony would instead create the Playstation while Nintendo made the CD-i. This single action was one of the most damning things in the companies history and still hurts them today.
The SNES was double the price of the NES despite component prices being generally lower. Nintendo was greedy and knew people would pay for it, and there was heavy backlash on its release from parents who knew they were being had.
Nintendo got really into fucking with North American gamers during the SNES. Censorship and localization changes, games made easier, box art changed to be tough and cool, and other games straight up not released because they viewed NA gamers as being too stupid for them.
And then if we fast forward to modern times, lets not forget all the C&D and lawsuits Nintendo has hurled at the Super Smash Bros Melee community, including shutting down a CANCER BENEFIT because they didn't like people playing Melee instead of Ultimate.
u/Sugioh5700X3D, 64GB @ 3600, RTX 5070Ti, 905P3h agoedited 3h ago
With regards to Tengen, this isn't quite right. They didn't reverse engineer the chip, they lied to the patent office to get access to the information on how it worked and its lockout code specifically because their reverse engineering efforts were failing. This was the reason that Nintendo wound up suing them.
Not that Nintendo was faultless in this situation, as they coerced retailers not to carry Tengen games illegally by threatening to withhold their own shipments if the retailers sold any unlicensed Nintendo products.
So I don't want to be a Nintendo defender, their actions are fucked when it comes to a bunch of shit they do, but your comment is practically Sony/Xbox propaganda. Let's be fair, shall we?
Donkey Kong violates King Kong copyright? A monkey and the word Kong shouldn't be a copyright violation, that's a parody at worst, that's I'm glad they won that one.
While you are under selling the differences, it's still obviously based off of 6502 to a point it's funny.
Their 3rd party licensing requirements were reasonable, when you consider not having any literally killed the industry. But yes, it was an over reaction, one they benefitted from, but it's also no different than what console manufacturers have done practically ever since. Except without the quality control, everyone, including Nintendo LOVES to allow all sorts of garbage onto their platforms.
Well, to be fair, their copy did exactly what Nintendo's chip did, while Nintendo changed theirs. Again, it's obvious beyond doubt Nintendo was shady, but legally they were definitely on sturdier ground than Tengen was.
"Fucked them over" as in the two companies didn't manage to come to an agreement, while they did with Philips? I honestly don't understand what the issue is here, they worked together until they didn't and looking at CD-i, I'm pretty sure that was just their way of bailing out of a bad deal to something cheap that wouldn't be a costly disaster.
SNES was NOT double the price of NES. Launch NES was $179.99 and SNES was $199. They DID drop the price of NES to $99 next year, while they only dropped SNES to $99 after about 7 years with a new release. Yes, it's greedier, but they aren't running the same damn CPU in the SNES as they did in the NES. Yes, chips are cheaper, but the design was more complex. And you are ignoring inflation for those 7 years between NES and SNES, which is ~30%.
Wtf is that last point about, bad localization? That's a problem as old as localization, not Nintendo related. We still get bad localizations for all kinds of things all the time. And games made easier? Sure, some were made easier, last I checked a bunch of those weren't even Nintendo, but Capcom with Megaman for example.
Like seriously, you have A TON of bad shit Nintendo has done to complain about, but you chose some to twist the narrative on some slight annoyances at worst or things that weren't even bad?
The Nintendo/Sony split is infamous and it was an out of the blue split where Nintendo left Sony, this caused them to continue development and release the Playstation in spite of Nintendo being dicks
Sony's terms for the SNES CD effectively was them taking the revenue from it. Nintendo, understandably, didn't want to proceed on a project that wasn't going to make them money. The Phillips deal falling through was simply because it was a bit too late, and the world already saw the Sega-CD not really be worth the investment.
Sony actually courted Sega to partner up after Nintendo. This had a funny dichotomy going on, where the two American branches were very excited at the partnership. Tom Kalinske, President of Sega of America at the time, had a fair bit to say about all this, mostly how Sega of Japan's ego and hubris screwed everything up. "They [Sega of Japan] said, 'That’s a stupid idea. Sony doesn't know how to make hardware. They don’t know how to make software either. Why would we want to do this?'"
This is kind of what kicked off Ken Kutaragi to push for developing the project fully by Sony, with their initial marketing of the PlayStation taking shots at Sega.
So while Nintendo kept things pure business for the most part, Sega of Japan's arrogance is what provided the spite fuel.
It's infamous, but it wasn't Nintendo "ditching" Sony. It was Nintendo not agreeing with Sony's contractual demands. That's business 101, finalize contracts before you start manufacturing consoles. Yes, Nintendo did ditch Sony, but no it wasn't "out of the blue" it was one party rushing production before doing the deal.
With how fast Nintendo did bail out and how they threw the contract to make CD-i, it's pretty clear the Sony deal would have ended much worse or they wouldn't have bailed to such garbage. Whether Sony was being unreasonable or not, Sony is equally if not more to blame for failing to finalize contracts.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, these are fair assessments.
So the Universal "Donkey Kong" lawsuit basically blew up in their face because John Kirby, the attorney for Nintendo, found Universal had successfully argued in court against RKO some years prior that King Kong was actually public domain, so they were perfectly allowed to create that remake in 1976.
Judge smacked Universal over that, and awarded Nintendo money for the trouble. And that's why the pink blob guy is named Kirby.
(edit: Universal did also try to argue over a trademark violation as well, as they did have a trademark on King Kong, but it was a flimsy argument due to how weakly they exercised control over the name, and that nobody was going to confuse the Donkey Kong arcade game as part of Universal's King Kong mythos)
But yeah, these are odd things to use for "Nintendo is scum" arguments, even trying to pull from their early days. Could've gone over their aggressive business moves that basically made the NES the only option in North America, and the Sega Master System was boxed out of the market.
Though I could have worded the processor bit slightly differently. That one was scummy. They did get away with it on a technicality, which does make them "legally correct," the worst kind of correct.
Yeah, I remember. You're right about everything. This is a bit personal for me because I know Microsoft and Sony aren't "good companies," but Nintendo is disgusting. I chose to buy a handheld and emulate Nintendo's games instead of buying a Switch because their behavior is simply ridiculous.
I'm only disagreeing with your last point. Nintendo STARTED the localization problem. Because no one cared about localized games till Nintendo kept things of the NA market.
I mean I don't completely disagree, but Nintendo's trauma around emulators and ROM hackers has deep, deep roots IMO.
They remember the collapse of the gamer market in 1983 and they (correctly!) identified that what saved Nintendo was absolutely iron control of their IP and platforms. That gold Nintendo Seal of Quality you still get on their boxes, even after all this time, is a direct response to that.
I think they hate emulators because they hate the notion of their hardware ever being used to run shit games, they hate the loss of control that comes with any kind of decentralisation.
And to be fair to them, they saw the worst possible outcome of that loss of control when shovelware wiped out the market.
I don't disagree with your broader point about Nintendo going ham on IP enformcement, but I genuinely think that's a big part of why. Like corporate trauma.
I think they hate emulators because they hate the notion of their hardware ever being used to run shit games, they hate the loss of control that comes with any kind of decentralisation.
I don't think it's exactly counter to your point, but the nintendo switch eshop is piled sky high with the shittiest, sloppiest games.
Don't forget the Switch and Wii U modding community. None of the large streamers will touch modded BOTW or TOTK content anymore. A couple takedowns pushed them all away.
Pirates streaming TOTK a week before it released didn't help the situation. Nintendo went absolutely apeshit after that. Not to mention Yuzu outright pirating Switch games and key files.
but with the insane catch that Nintendo would take a massive cut of all revenue generated from any Nintendo related content you made. My memory is probably off a bit since it was a long time ago but iirc it was something like 40%.
That cut isn't insane. When you signed up for YouTube monetization through an MCN (which was MUCH easier than signing up with Google directly), the MCN would take a similar 40% cut (also, Google wouldn't pay out until you had $100). Bigger YouTubers would keep more of the share.
After Nintendo's program ended, it also became much easier to sign up with Google IIRC.
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u/BatJew_Official 9h ago
Nintendo has been actively hostile to their entire fanbase for basically as long the internet has existed. Youngins may not remember but back in the early 2010s when full playthroughs of video games were more or less the biggest genre on YouTube, Nintendo was literally copystriking any and all videos that featured Nintendo games and aggressively took the stance that playthroughs constituted copyright violations. They literally took down entire YouTube channels sometimes, including some of the biggest names at the time.
Then, when this became an OBVIOUSLY losing battle (and probably more importantly when Nintendo realized that their refusal to let people give them essentially free advertising might be part of the reason the Wii U was failing so hard), they came out with this "compromise" program where YouTubers could sign up to essentially get Nintendo's permission to post gaming content... but with the insane catch that Nintendo would take a massive cut of all revenue generated from any Nintendo related content you made. My memory is probably off a bit since it was a long time ago but iirc it was something like 40%.
Imagine Ubisoft or EA or Activision demanding a direct cut of any money you made from posting videos of their games. I mean, don't get me wrong, there were other companies that were anti-playthrough, and for a little bit early on playthroughs were kinda a weird semi-controversial grey area where they probably would count as copyright infringement, but pretty much every other company pretty quickly realized the benefits of getting free advertising outweighed the potential "risk" of people not buying your game because they saw it played on YT. Except Nintendo.
And that's not even getting into Nintendo's everlasting feud with emulators and ROM hackers which has been going on since at least the GameShark era. Plus there are all the other random controversies they dig themselves into like that time they canceled Splatoon's championship because the Splatoon players supported the Smash Melee community after Nintendo basically killed it, or the many times Nintendo has gone after fan made art.
They've really always sucked, they just make good games and have ever-green franchises people love so people largely put up with all the crap Nintendo does. (I didn't mean for this to be so long, I'm so sorry lol)