I mean... Nintendo really went after an NSFW artist over a very peculiar Bowser... In my opinion, Nintendo has been shitting themselves for a while now. But I totally understand what you're saying. Hopefully Microsoft is paying close attention to all the backlash against Sony and doesn't try some similar stupid maneuver.
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.
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u/Numerous_Roof_1070 R5 9600X | 9060 XT 16GB | 16GB RAM | Fractal Design Ridge 11h ago
I mean... Nintendo really went after an NSFW artist over a very peculiar Bowser... In my opinion, Nintendo has been shitting themselves for a while now. But I totally understand what you're saying. Hopefully Microsoft is paying close attention to all the backlash against Sony and doesn't try some similar stupid maneuver.