Yamauchi No.10 Family Office
y-n10.com
y-n10.com
"Seeking stability only clouds your soul. Fear of failing only kills the seeds of innovation. We must create a more exciting future where people feel free to dream and leap into a world of possibilities. We must create a freer future where people are eager to truly live."
It's hard not to love Nintendo.
Also TLDR for those that didn't scroll through the whole thing, this family wants to use their wealth to fund business ventures in Japan. For those unfamiliar, Japan has had a so-called "Great Stagnation" since the 90s. Population has declined, GDP growth is slow and puttering, and some are saying that Japan has lost the edge it had in the 80s.
This sounds like the Yamauchi family's attempt to bootstrap and create an ecosystem of ventures to reinvigorate entrepreneurship in Japan and their way of giving back.
And ignore the "GDP" stuff. You will read the same about Italy in English language newspapers. And (South) Korea. Both are also beautiful countries with great food and very high quality of life.
I look at overall GDP less than GDP-per capita. The best metric in my mind is historical median salary. This gives a great idea of how middle class people live. As long as it holds steady and inflation is zero, then quality of life does not decline. The truth is that Japan has microscopic growth (~1% per year) combined with annual population decline of ~0.5% per year. Those two together should mean quality of life is still increasing a little bit each year. And, yes, each year that I return to Tokyo, I feel it is still improving.
Still, of course, great people, great culture, great potential.
Same with Japan: wonderful culture, nice people, but the problems are real. And somehow, I suppose, they are rooted in the same great culture as the nice things :-/
Eviction takes YEARS and it's just impossible in some situations (kids in the house), healthcare is free for all, personal debt is not as aggressive as here, unpaid debt is a nightmare to go afer.
So unemployment figures are not really that important to gauge quality of life. We had many scandals where people just didn't want to get hired and do small works off the books instead because life was just better like that.
You can be broke and still have a wonderful life in Italy. If you are smart and you want to get rich: much easier in the US.
Also about your Italian friends: Italian love to complain! If you ask them, they'll tell you. They will complain about everything all day with you. And then leave and go drink a nice aperitivo with their friends and enjoy the evening. It's very different from the US style of projecting an idyllic image of your life when you are with others, and then go home and drink whiskey until you forget you are alive. (Source: Italian living in US for 10 years)
The blue collar industries have issues hiring junior people for exactly this reason in many of the HCOL parts of the US. Nobody in their right mind wants to suffer through a couple years as a lube and tire tech when you can work when you can get paid more fixing people's cars under the table.
> I'm sure their customers will completely understand, pay the higher costs without complaint, and not at all go and find alternative suppliers.
The real issue may be that the investors won't understand, and won't take reduced profits without complaint.
There's brands like Firestone and Jiffy Lube although I thought everyone knew that was a scam by now.
I'll take the lower pension, will you pass on the message for me? For some reason, the fund managers won't take calls from individual participants.
I'm just noting there's multiple dials here, and it's weird that it's often totally forgotten that "less profits" is just as reasonable as "higher consumer prices." Also you'll note that there are some people who profit extraordinarily from capital and have extraordinary control, and there are some people who profit much less and have even less control than that (and have little choice but to participate in the system as it exists). It's a false equivalency to equate the two.
(The comment I originally replied to specifically referenced "lube and tire tech" as a role companies have trouble hiring for)
I know that Italy isn't perfect, but the Italian-style post-Imperial "chill-out" seems to work well in a lot of ways. I'm an American with no Italian heritage, but I was born there and I think I might have imprinted a bit. I hope to go back someday.
Maybe
That may be, for now, but the problems are real. For young people with degrees, wages are not comparable with those of Nothern Europe, and many end up living with their parents for years, in between poorly paid, insecure jobs. Besides, in Nothern Europe also, the social benefits and indeed the whole economy can deteriorate.
I live in a neighboring country, Malta, and we share some similarities. Because our country are two small islands, housing is very expensive. So we have a unique case where a lot of people live with their parents until they get married or are in a very very stable relationship/financially well. This makes us very dependant on our parents, but it is not as bad as people make it seem. Our parents can depend on us to help and we continue saving.
There isin't a lot that can be done. Moving to one of the Northern European countries will not solve the problems our Southern countries are having.
I agree with your points. This familial habit is a blessing for Italians, given the direction their economy is taking. It is indeed another positive cultural value that, in this case, may even reinforce societal cohesion.
Are you aware there are two countries that are casually referred to as "Congo" by non-Africans? (Hello Africans! We hear you loud and clear!) Sorry, this is a real issue for me. I am so tired of Western (and East Asian!) media using the broad label "African" to sweep 50 countries under the rug that have very diverse development histories.
To be clear: (1) Democratic Republic of the Congo has GDP per capita below 1000 USD per year and is one of the least developed countries in the world -- affected by unfortunate tropical diseases and civil war. (2) Republic of the Congo is doing much better! Neighbors, but a GDP per capita that is 2.5 times of DRC.
If you are aware of all of this, ignore this post. If not, please kindly educate yourself before posting about the so-called sad lives of people from "Congo" -- a place that has not existed for more than 75 years!
Both DRC ($420 per capita) and RoC ($390 per capita) are not well-off, compared to more fortunate countriers relatively nearby, like Nigeria ($2140 per capita), to say nothing if e.g.Botswana ($7k per capita).
Italy, for scale, got $31630 per capita in 2020, nearly 80 times that of RoC.
Reminds me of the heuristic, the more modifiers a country's name has, the more likely it is to have economic or political issues. See for example, Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea vs Republic of Korea.
You could rewrite “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” in English to “The People’s Rule People’s Concern of the People of Korea”. Like any good lie, repetition doesn’t make it more true, and looks desperate.
My rule of thumb:
One use indicates a dark past the people would like to get away from with citizens, not subjects; two an authoritarian regime the people are subjects of and told they are citizens; three an authoritarian regime without any hope of redemption and the people are property of.
Interesting, informative, and polite. (Last one is super important)
Show after show of very old people keeping the family business, farm or trains running. Kids off to the city, grandma literally crawling through the family peach orchard weeding. Lone western adventure cyclist droning around to largely empty roads, cultural sites, towns and always visiting “the last [insert hand skill] in the prefecture”.
It’s quite fascinating to watch, and I can’t wait to visit, but they’re not hiding it.
The US is only a couple generations behind them and we will not be going in as dignified a manner.
As you should. But a quick search suggests GDP/capita is below where it was in 95, and only exceeded it for a short period around 2010:
https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+gdp+per+capita&oq=japa...
I'm not sure that the numbers support the narrative you're putting forth here; population decline is not offsetting the lack of overall GDP growth, and the GPT/capita numbers are essentially flat.
I think it's entirely possible for both "It is still a wonderful culture, people, and country." and "three decades of economic stagnation" to be true.
We haven't quite reached this level of AI dystopia yet. Give it a few years. ;)
Of course it is. But that doesn't make the problems less real.
The demographic pressure cooker is still cooking-- a greater and greater proportion of national resources go to support an ever increasing fraction of the old, and stopping this is impossible at this point. Prospects for dating and marriage are collapsing for a large chunk of the populace. Government debt is increasing as a share of GDP and with the change in the dependency ratio and declining populace default looks increasingly likely in the long term.
As an outsider they seem to have a lot higher quality of life than the US in many ways.
Germany was a wealthy country once, now it's a disgrace for the median citizen. It's bureaucracy is overbearing and inefficient. It's political class at once haughty, arrogant, incompetent, and corrupt.
Anyone but big business, the rich and the government paid parasitical classes (politicians, bureaucrats and the state media propagandists) gets fucked all day, every day.
Germany is a country in decline. The leadership of the ruling party of the last 16 years is indifferent if not actively hostile towards the common people while the major opposition parties are, if anything, even worse. They have the cool rationality, economic competency and sober long-sightedness of an ethanol-pickeled naked mole rat in a blast furnace.
I wish I could believe otherwise, but as things currently stand I fear that Germany is done. It'll just take a few more decades until everyone notices.
Yes, and slowly sliding down the list.
The demographic one is the real killer. Debt is high compared to their GDP, and their GDP is not growing, and there is a big structural headwind with the population shrinking and getting older.
> Germany looks almost no different, yet I rarely hear about German stagnation
Germany has smaller versions of the same demographic and growth problems. However, Germany's real GDP has increased by about 30% in the last 20 years, versus Japan managing about 18%. About 50% for the United States.
Over the past 30 years: 53%, 32%, 102%.
My stats show Japan looking the same as Germany last 10 years, and near many other European countries.
Germany 3.696T in 2009, 4.471T in 2019 = 20.9%.
Japan grew at 2/3rds the rate of Germany in the last 10 years, against the backdrop of a significantly worse 10 years before that.
The shape of the graph looks similar, but the difference between 1.019^n and 1.012^n over a long time is massive. Not to mention that Germany is not particularly healthy.
It's rather spectacular if you look at the per capita PPP GDP series, actually-- https://i.imgur.com/eD8cECd.png
Yes, it'll be about 23 years at the present pace for Germany to surpass Japan in absolute terms, but Japan has a much larger population and Germany has better prospects for long term growth.
Germany's debt is ~60% of GDP, and Japan's is 240%, too, which is pretty terrifying when GDP is not growing much and may begin to contract in absolute terms from demographic changes.
Here's a better graph: https://imgur.com/a/2QI5E41
It's funny, your graph cuts off right before it, and is a perfect example of extrapolating too soon. It's that one big recession dip, and since then are doing better, and before that doing better. More spurts, higher angles recently.
I think there is some misunderstanding here about reading a graph for growth rate. Anything that starts off higher is likely to have "higher angles" even if it shows a lower growth rate. Which looking at the numbers, we see-- we already did the arithmetic a couple posts ago. Part of why the per capita series looks so bad: it starts at about the same value so the effect of a higher baseline is not so misleading.
The debt to GDP problem, combined with anemic GDP growth and population structural factors that make high growth unlikely for a century, combine to be a big concern that you haven't addressed. Instead you handwave at graphs in a way that doesn't boost anyone's understanding.
Easy to endlessly discuss this though, but without good faith on your side it won’t go anywhere useful.
I stand strongly by the point that anyone spouting Japan stagnation memes is just repeating shallow media talking points that are outdated and don’t reflect reality on the ground... yea, stagnation from a trajectory to be bigger than the US in GDP from a tiny island nation. Without so so many of the problems of the US. The quality of life there is incredibly high, they’re incredibly rich, they’re adjusting many soft factors to be better to work, women, and newer economic abilities.
It’s very roughly like if everyone went around talking about how Ferrari is stagnating, when they’ve had 2/5 popular cars in the last decade (incl one this year) and most other carmakers had 3/5 (but most none this year). Ok, maybe you can argue that, and I wouldn’t agree but fine, but it’s still a Ferrari and the rest of the world is driving Kia. The meme has gotten so strong people are actually out there now thinking Kia > Ferrari. I’m just bringing perspective to how it feels day to day there.
Don't accuse me of bad faith when you will not address this point. You keep telling me about higher or similar growth when the numbers do not support it.
As to the debt picture: it becomes more difficult to grow GDP to cover large debt when the working age population is destined to shrink relatively sharply. The demographic squeeze isn't a opinion or theory-- it is a certainty. Even liberalizing immigration policy would not be enough now, and there have only been the tiniest steps in that direction.
I would have been on the opposite side of this argument for a long time-- enthusiastic and optimistic for Japan's economics trends to improve, and a fan of many of the country's institutions. But at this point, there has been decades of underperformance-- yes, from a track to outpace the US's GDP on an absolute level to now being 2/3rds of it on a per-capita basis, with ongoing slower growth and terrible demographic trends.
The dependency ratio is going to be 0.79 people 65+ for every person 20-64 in 30 years, and the overall population will be 25% smaller. The working age population will be 33% smaller. This is a very difficult environment to have significant absolute growth in.
And, again, comparing to Germany is silly... because many of us are also concerned about the same factors-- underperforming growth, demographic shifts -- in Germany.
Here’s your same PPP/GDP graph with a bunch of first world nations, the USA Uk etc + Mexico and Russia, last 5 years or so.
Please point out the Japan line which should by your argument be an even semi obvious outlier.
All I’ve claimed is at best you can say they are slightly below average for a first world nation, and still very high in absolute terms. To refute, you’d have to show that they are significantly lagging, not just a little as that’s not been my claim ever. It’s just not there. The hype is real.
It's like you don't understand my main point: it is difficult to judge differences growth on a linear scale graph. It's like the dishonest COVID-19 graphs early on which showed coronavirus in comparison to other causes of death, and you couldn't see exponential growth it looked boring.
That's why sometimes it's useful to use a log scale, or to just divide the numbers and compare them, to understand rates of growth.
I think I see why we disagree: your entire argument is based on eyeballing (misleading, linear) graphs instead of comparing numbers. I have hit this point 4 times in the thread so far, and you keep making an argument based on eyeballing graphs.
Log scale is absolutely not the right measure, actually didn’t even see that nifty trick because I would never have expected it used! No wonder your graph looked totally wrong. Log scale would work if they were staying constant so we could compare on long time scales, but that’s so far from the case. If you can’t admit that, we can’t have a discussion. You really should know that to be talking about this stuff.
These are close values that are fluctuating too much. The swings over the last 10 years is relevant, in absolute values. I can write the numbers out for you, but the graphs are actually less refutable. You insinuate they aren’t, but they are they’re than numbers for this use: comparing relative performance. We want to see how they all are doing, in a straightforward comparison.
No, my point is you’re choosing your window very selectively and distorting the numbers to fit your narrative, and when I take the window away your point doesn’t stand, as it doesn’t
Things growing at the same rate are parallel then.
I compared things on a 30 year, 20 year, and 10 year timescale. On each of them, Germany significantly outperformed Japan.
You’re doing a lot of work avoiding looking at the graph I posted in earnest. It’s the right graph, and again you can’t choose an outlier.
I've given you 5 different framings at this point:
* Real GDP PPP % change over 30, 20, and 10 years to the most recent fully reported year. * Share of high-income country GDP over last 20 years * Per capita PPP GDP over 30 years, where it slid from parity with Germany in 2005 to about 80% of Germany's.
But they're all bad in favor of looking at a linear scale graph, where starting from a higher value in the green series obscures that the percentage of growth is low compared to most of the members of the set.
If you're determined to believe a specific conclusion, there's not much point in discussion.
This is a reasonable graph to "eyeball" because it's not distorted significantly by starting point or overall underlying growth trend.
Neither Germany nor Japan looks great, and Japan looks worse. Then you consider Japan has 1.5x the population and a lower per-capita GDP...
I also love the gesture, but it obviously won’t do much on the grand scale. Not even the massive 2011 disaster was enough to light the fire again.
Here is a thought experiment about growth: What if Google never grew again, but maintained the same revenues and profits going forward? To be clear: Their stock price would crash because portfolio theory teaches us that stock price is an indication of future earnings growth. This is what Japan looks like in my mind: Very rich and developed by global standards, but mostly economically stagnant.
"Not even the massive 2011 disaster was enough to light the fire again." Zero trolling: Are you aware of the special tax for reconstruction in Japan? (I pay it.) It runs for 40 or 50 years and will collect billions (USD) to rebuild and reinvigorate the affected regions. I went on a road trip through Iwate prefecture 2.5 years ago. They are rebuilding. Yes, most places feel like eerie "potemkin villages", but I am confident they can rebuild.
This fund is a typical Japanese corporate bullshit. You can see who manages it an know everything you need to.
They could just pay 10mil yen stipend per child after second and it would be far more effective. Japan needs young people, period. Not more taxes, infrastructure etc
I lived in Japan for a while, loved it. But the crash when it comes in 10-20years as countryside disintegrates is going to be horrific.
I wasn't talking about rebuilding after the disaster; I know they're doing that (and I also pay the tax). I was talking about lighting the fire of ambition and innovation in Japan again. At the time I had hope that the scale of the disaster and impact on the nation's psyche might be enough to awaken the spirit again like the Meiji Restoration or the Economic Miracle. However, all that happened is they committed to rebuilding and turned off a lot of the lights.
Unfortunately this is standard marketing pablum for Japanese companies, with "future" (mirai) and "dream" (yume) both being particularly common tropes. Alan Booth talks about this back in 1995 in Looking for the Lost:
> I passed through the pavilion's Dream Tunnel into the World of Dream and from there to the Parades of Dream and Play. ... Technology, specifically the technology of Mitsui, Toshiba, and the rest beyond his wildest, yes, dreams, can help you fly again. "Love, love, love!" sings a choir as we file out of the pavilion. "You can reach the sky, if you only try!"
In other words, I'm sure you have fond memories of playing a bunch of Nintendo videogames, but if you think that to climb out of economic stagnation, we just need to believe in ourselves, that's just a bunch of mealy-mouthed wahoo!
Games are an art form, completely on par with books, paintings, or movies. I'd say they are one of the most important art forms of our times.
The writing is often so terrible... I wish I could think of a single video game that touched me like The Brothers Karamazov or Les Miserables.
For me, Firewatch was a stunning call to action about avoiding the problems in your life. Beyond direct narrative, there is the silent story seen in games that is rarely seen in books. The implied bits, the attention to detail, the care and love to the craft. For example, there are bits of the Zelda franchise that trends a hair into Jack Kerouac's ending of On The Road. The little moments where you can feel and realize the breath experience of those you interact with, the people you save and those who save you. In that moment you can feel that book-like internal narrative defining all that could have been or might have been. Zelda Wind Waker is exceptionally notable in this space. Majora's Mask defined it.
But masterpieces are few. For each cartridge full of second-rate mindless 8-bit games there is a pack of books by Barbara Cartland, or whatnot.
This is also true of the vast majority of books ever written.
However one could already say that they are the most innovative (and interesting) art form these days.
Check out The Longing, Wanderlust: Travel Stories or Firewatch for recent emotionally deep games.
I played these games at friends' houses back then and didn't see the appeal. Games like Need for Speed, Mortal Kombat or Goldeneye 007 felt more real, less 'kiddie' oriented. But these games aren't really spoken of much these days, while Nintendo originals definitely are.
Need For Speed is considered to be in decline. Mortal Kombat‘s making was a bit controversial with the whole “make employees watch graphic executions to nail the art”, now that in 2021 the focus is less on kids watching violence and more about not abusing employees. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/05/one_mortal_kombat_...
Mario more or less has inspired the same kind of nice fuzzy feeling and polish that is the series’ mainstay. Breath of the Wild reimagined Zelda into an explorable open world to rave reviews.
A company pollutes a nearby river and manages to avoid responsibility, so public funds are required to clean it up. The money the company made by polluting, as well as the cost of cleanup, both contribute positively to GDP.
GDP can in some ways be thought of as a measure of conversion of natural resources into monetary capital. Given the declining state of the environment and unsustainability of many commercial practices, we're at a point where we should start considering this a negative.
We need a new measure that factors in negative externalities and utilization of finite natural capital.
You are correct that GDP is being misused if people suggest it is a measure of success or quality of life. GDP is what it is, a measure of economic activity (any economic activity, more than just conversion of natural resources into monetary capital). That makes it only one piece of a very complicated puzzle. Many practitioners who use GDP understand it for what it is, but some don't and that is dangerous.
I'd be interested to hear if you or anyone else has suggestions of what we could use instead. It is a very difficult problem to solve, but one that has the potential for improving the world significantly.
gdp (and gnp before that) has been trumped up and misused by the mediopolitical machine for decades, so this has (unfortunately) become a distinction without a real difference.
rather than a resource-oriented view (stuff getting turned into money) as the gp posited, i'd suggest that economic activity should be viewed as the total (levered) labor production of the population instead. this makes it more about the flows rather than the stocks, a dynamic measure rather than a static one. it also centers the discussion around the attribute we centrally value and should be focused on, productive activity, not merely any economic activity, which can be entirely unproductive, as we see with more and more capital concentrating without productive purpose.
no matter what, you'd still need to discriminate and discount activity caused by negative externalities, as the gp astutely pointed out. but that could be a simple as adding a minus sign in front of that activity, as the term itself suggests.
How so?
When I pay my accountant to do my taxes, it adds to GDP. How is this “conversion of natural resources into monetary capital”?
And it also sounds like their attempt to make more money. Let's just not lose sight of reality amidst all the fluff.
There's rumors of a startup scene in China. /S
Greater China has lots: HK (tho not a country in itself, but a special region of China) has some. Republic of China Taiwan has lots.
Singapore has a huge amount.
There's also a lot of people doing more "craft based" or "small business" startups in all those areas, such as cafes, organic or urban farms, manufacturing of various kinds.
Tho that is not the same as VC funded tech startups, some of these things do go that way. There's lots of delivery and gig economy startups. Lots of payment startups. Much of the innovation in social and payment that occurred in the last 6 years has been lifted out of East Asia and copied by startups everywhere.
A good resource for "out of the Anglosaxon / SV" bubble is TechInAsia.
The interesting thing about reading startup perspectives in Asia, is they are very aware of what happens in SV. An awareness that doesn't, unless you are an analyst at one of the big international VCs, go both ways.
Also interesting to note the culture in these places around entrepreneurship, it's very normal for people to consider having their own business. HK has one of the highest "company per capita" rates in the world, tho surely some of that is due to its special economic statuses. I don't know as much about other East Asian cultures, but ethnic Chinese culture is very "entrepreneurial", as in, many people have shops and businesses of various kinds. At least to me it seems to be an acceptable or desirable thing to do at a higher rate than the traditional Anglosaxon culture I also spent a lot of time in.
That's not entirely true, I guess there's other countries in East Asia: let's not forget Mongolia, and Tibet and Northern Korea.
I bet there'd be lots of startups in Mongolia tho I have no idea. Tibet have no idea, tho would love to go. NK I guess there would not be so much because I assume the government would control them, but honestly, I have zero idea right now about startups there.
Interesting to know more about startups in Japan. Apart from LINE/Naver (which I guess is in fact Korean), that Japanese clothing startup (the guy is Elon's friend and will go to space), the older one like Softbank, and many cafes and small (for lack of better word, not sure it applies in Japan), but, "hipster" businesses (things like fashion boutiques, designer household goods and design agencies) I have no idea about startups in Japan, as you can probably tell. Would love to know more.
There are not a few other startups (IPO'd e.g. Balmuda, MoneyForward, Mercari, ZOZO) but they tend to only available locally.
Other people can comment more on this one: The number of small start-up game studios must be astonishing. Japan seems to have an endless appetite for video games! For publishing, they will team-up with a major, like Sony.
The real reason Uber hasn't taken off in Japan is that restrictive legislation and a large taxi lobby (which is also responsible for a near-total lack of public transport at night) means UberX is impossible. DoorDash was not in Japan because local player Demae and Uber beat them to the punch, but the market is growing fast and they're joining the fray.
I disagree about Uber in general. At least in major cities in most places you'll get a taxi much faster than you'd get an Uber and abundant public transportation also reduces the need.
When I say Japanese startups: their market was Japan, their employees were all Japanese and they kept Japanese business hours.
I never got a good reason why they were in NY.
The most brief review of the actions of their legal team will or at least should turn you completely cold to them. Nintendo is a classic example of a corporation behaving as a psychopath.
No, actually it won't have this effect on many reasonable and intelligent people. Because for the most part Nintendo are only trying to protect their intellectual property, and it's easy to see why they would want to do that.
Few people really care that they're aggressively crushing the latest fan-made Pokémon game.
Nintendo have a massive fan base but they sure don't allow those fans to get creative.
Sega, by contrast, are the complete opposite and not only allow fan projects to exists but even allow them to operate commercially on a small scale.
edit: this comment is generating a lot more interest than I'd expected from my throwaway remarks and as a result a lot of the replies have missed the point of what I was complaining about. So I'll take some time now to expand on them a little more:
- this isn't just a "Japanese thing", Nintendo of America are just as bad. They issue hundreds of DMCA takedowns.
- this isn't a typical gaming thing either. I'm not going to pretend that all other companies are angelic but Nintendo seem uniquely proactive with chasing after their fan base even when those fans are just recording themselves playing games. Which leads me onto my 3rd point:
- Nintendo are not just trying to protect their IP. Nintendo offer a partner program that costs to be a part of and if you're not on there than your YouTube and Twitch channels can get DMCA'ed if they feature Nintendo games. Even retro gamers playing titles released 30+ years ago have been targeted. So this is often less about protecting IP and more about profiting on retro gamers hobby channels.
Nintendo's actions with the rest of the gaming community is quite unlike anything other gaming studios do. And I say this as someone actively involved in the retro gaming and streaming community. So many of my friends have ended up putting all of Nintendo's first party games on a "no play list" for their Twitch channels because of this. They've never had an issue with any other studio and they certainly don't run their channels for profit either (very few retro games on Twitch make money from their hobby). It's also hard to see how someone streaming a play through of a Nintendo game harms Nintendo as a company or their IP.
And to be clear, I do still like Nintendo in the general sense. I might not agree with how they treat their fans (particularly the retro gamers, streamers, reviewers on YT) but I do still enjoy their games. I just know better than to stream myself playing them. I guess that makes me a little hypocritical too.... :)
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/01/nintendo_issues_ma...
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/11/twitch_streamers_b...
I have friends who stream retro games via Twitch and the only they've ever had infractions from Twitch is when Nintendo have reported them for playing a retro Nintendo game without Nintendo's consent.
There's also bunch of YouTube videos from disgruntled reviewers moaning about how they've been treated by Nintendo, which I can't find right now.
So this isn't something I've just made up. It's a common gripe with the retro gaming and streaming community.
(Of course there's also a big unofficial fanart for profit community, which some companies tolerate because it gets them an artist pipeline.)
As someone who's actively involved in the retro gaming community on Twitch, there is a very stark difference between Nintendo and almost every other studio.
Sega and Capcom will try to get you permabanned if you're Japanese and do a monetized stream of their games without permission: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2020-08-06/hololiv...
And Atlus Japan won't give out streaming permissions even though Atlus US doesn't care at all.
That fan fiction is 90% sex related. Those stores have been running for ~20yrs? No one is shutting them down. Further the biggest comic event Comiket, is 70% unlicensed fan-fiction manga
One of the most popular series (Touhou) got that way because it has a permissive copyright license for the game world. I believe Comiket has some kind of legal exemption for the event too, though I don't remember the details.
Sometimes Sega even hires the developers, as was the case with Christian Whitehead, who did some Sonic ports for them, and then went on to make the critically acclaimed Sonic Mania.
They're saying grow the fuck up, and acknowledging that since that’s so hard for an entire generation they’ve inspired, they are trying to inspire these adult-children again with venture capital to create new things.
That’s the opposite of hypocrisy. Pursuing their own property rights to keep their property valuable? Sell them some shares and they’ll make sure you have that expectation with your IP too.
How does YouTube reviewers fall into that category? Because Nintendo have targeted them too.
You don't realise just how far reaching Nintendo's lawyers are and thus just assume it's the usual case of "They're stealing from us!" (to quote Pirates of Silicon Valley).
The discussion organically lead to my point (I don't just go around moaning about Nintendo for giggles in any old thread) and it's not as if HN doesn't already have a long and rich history of conversations going off topic.
I also don't see why authority you have to tell me which topics are off topic on this discussion board. If you're not interested in a tangent then fold it and move on. It's what I do :)
At any rate, I would love to see something like a decentralized Disney or Nintendo spring up in the world. Like a decentralized universe of open source characters that people could interact with and riff on. Something like what happens with memes like Pepe already, but more Disney/Nintendo-esque. I wonder if that couldn't be organized with a DAO for the community to contribute to and fund the artists that build the characters and universe. Anyways, random thoughts.
And meanwhile, I think stuff like fan art, fan fiction, spin offs, etc could maybe create an even more vibrant ecosystem than a Disney or Nintendo ever could.
I mean, look at the ancient Greek and Roman mythology. That was an open source ecosystem of stories and legends that different people contributed to and built on over long periods of time. It could easily happen today.
Open Source Disney, Open Source Marvel, Open Source Nintendo
I think the time is right for such a thing to happen.
- The Little Mermaid
- The Jungle Book
- Tarzan
- Cinderella
- A Christmas Carol
- Fantasia
- Pinocchio
- Alice in Wonderland
- Beauty and the Beast
- Aladin
- Heracles
All folk tails or public domain stories. Even Tangled and Frozen have taken heavily from other stories. And I'm certain there's more I've forgotten.
Likewise Marvel has borrowed a lot from Norse mythology with Thor's story arcs.
I've never really followed comic book fandom that closely so I can't comment on what pre-Disney Marvel were like to their fans. But with regards to Disney, it always left a bad taste in my mouth just how aggressively Disney were to protect their IP from harmless fans when Disney themselves owe their millions to ripping off other peoples stories.
That said they have never tried to test that trademark in the courts.
I thought about putting another term into the public domain, something like uberheros/ultraheros and then allowing artists, writers, and other creatives to define their characters as such, and while also in the public domain, allow remixing and reinterpretation of the archetypes and stories.
I think the easiest way to start this would be to setup a git repo to describe how it works and what it means to place one of your characters or stories into the public domain. Then build a community and tools to help people and teams do so.
Streamers telling raunchy jokes, dressing sexily and/or swearing while playing a Mario game probably does hurt Nintendo's brand, at least in their eyes.
There's a reason Smash Brothers Ultimate's online mode only has voice chat in private rooms through a smartphone app.
I doubt Nintendo’s bottom line is affected at all by this “revenue stream”. It is all about keeping the value of their IP high.
This is more or less the story of Europe, however in the case of Japan, the central Bank (BOJ) actively conspired to kill (aka reform) the Japanese economy by creating a boom-bust cycle out of bank lending quota manipulation.
It all sounds "conspiratorial" but is well documented in "Princes of the Yen" (anything questioning illegitimate power today, is automatically a "conspiracy"...). It's really quite sad to see the country which set the model for Asia being destroyed like this.
(Also the phrase "giving back" implies you've been doing something unjust. You only give back after you've taken. But all just business practice is about fair exchange, so there's nothing to "give back".)
And at first glance, it appears to work fine even with javascript disabled.
I think my beauty standards are terribly outdated since the last thing I would say about that website is that it is beautiful. Let me list my concerns:
1. It plays sound in the background 2. It is horrible cluttered, the only missing thing are those '90 animated torches and blinking text (but those moving blocks are even more annoying, what is an achievement in itself) 3. It is totally unreadable. Grey text on the black background, text is shifted, so reading requires keeping ones head bent over to the right. I can't imagine that someone with bad eyesight would be able to read the text.
Fun fact: the designer know that this sucks so there is some "switcher" that let you make text straight. One more fun thing: this switcher in barely visible for me when page loads, since "view" text is displayed on top of yellow "3D castle" on the left that cast grey shades, that are almost the same as grey color used for text.
4. You can't mark text, it is somehow blocked, so if you want to copy paste something (for instance to translate), it is not possible. No idea what could be the purpose for doing this.
5. Ctrl F for searching does not work, found text is not highlighted
If this is "innovation" and "creativity" and the way to "improve society" that this website keep chanting in every sentence I would say, thanks a lot for your corpo PR talk, you make into HN top page, good job, but better go back to making money and please leave society alone (and don't go into website building business, pleassssse).
Reading text without straining your neck muscles and pinching nerves is boring now?
Some behinds the scenes production stuff on their Twitter feed. [1]
[0]: https://mount.jp/
[1]: https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969
But I can hear the criticisms now--I don't get it; Why the jeep? How do I know how much content is present? How do I find project x? Do I have to drive this truck all over?
[Answers: Cute&amazing in-browser experience. Follow the sign to projects--drive really fast to count them. Follow signs to projects--drive slow and read labels. Yes.]
"a little bit of behind the scenes
We build a custom modeling and layout/placement tool. We use the modeling tool to build the object models and the animations.
The animations are build pixel by pixel and frame by frame, then placed using the layout tool.
274 original model objects "
https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381892567457882...
This website is so magical. It gives me a child-like feeling of true discovery.
The first website I ever visited was SGI.com. I saw it advertised in a computer magazine, but I didn't have access to the Internet. By chance, a few months later, I learned the central branch of my city library had one PC with dial-up. You had to reserve it. The waiting list was long. I still remember staring at the blank grey browser window, carefully pecking "www.sgi.com" into the location bar. Then... waiting, and waiting, and waiting(!) for all the graphics to load. SGI's homepage was full of these beautiful pre-rendered three-dimensional graphics. It was worth the wait!
Website of the family of the founder of Nintendo. Of course it's like this. Ha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office
Hiroshi Yamauchi (previous CEO) alone had a net worth of around $8 billion at peak:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Yamauchi
Which is why the CxOs are all ex-Goldman Sachs, Nomura, Deutsche, etc.
But awesome site.
Tested On both Safari and Chrome on macOS. 100% CPU usage when scrolling.
Edit: On WOW, from the comments I decide to try it on my iPhone 11. Ultra Smooth Rendering with Music ( which wasn't even playing on my Mac ). And my phone isn't even warm after a minutes of playing around. Amazing
Which makes me wonder. Why?
It runs very smoothly on Chrome + Windows with a dated computer.
For example, Firefox seems to make use of the more proprietary Core Animation API got certain tender tasks, which no other OS needs special code for. If the Core Animation API or the code calling it has a bottleneck, you'll only see this problem on macOS.
It could also be a consequence of the way Apple optimises their laptops. On my phone and laptop, the websites hammers one single core (about 87% CPU usage on my laptop here). Apple has optimised their CPU power curves (on Intel, at least) to turbo high and turbo quickly, making actions like loading a website and opening an app nice and snappy. The design of the laptops doesn't allow these high turbo speeds for more than a few seconds, so CPU performance drops after a few seconds. For most use cases that's fine, but I can see a website like this running into that problem. Same thing is happening on Chrome, which is snappier for me but also more CPU intensive.
Edit: actually, after trying Firefox on my hackintosh (7700k, gtx1080), it's more likely to be hardware related. I have no trouble whatsoever with the website on any browser on my desktop, even the outdated copy of Safari works fine.
Re: the detail, occasionally, the little blocks will randomly run into each other. When they do, they roll /over/ each other!
Re: performance, I've got no problems running it in FF on ubuntu.
(But doesn't seem to be related.)
FYI I'm on 16'mbp so there is more than enough processing power. Maybe it is because of 11MB the website needs for the button to start working (delivered via 114 requests), but on the other hand my network throughput is around 100mb.
edit: Network monitor says that each of png tiles (~300B) took 11sec on average to receive.
edit: Still can reproduce this but the loading time fluctuates 3-11secs. I'm on FFv87. Maybe I'm too far from the CDN server.
I have seen quite a few comments from people on Macbooks that have a terrible experience with the website, though, so maybe the problem is related to that? It could be that the GPU isn't great at rendering the specific code path this website hits, or that the network card hits some kind of edge case with the way this website deals with its assets, or something entirely different.
It could also just be that the richer dev crowd generally buys Macbooks and the numbers are overstated, of course.
It's whimsical and interesting which is certainly the message they were going for considering the intent of the website itself and resulted in more discussion about its mission than it would normally earn on social media, I think. Talking about the good ol' days of Japan's economic dominance and how it was perceived as a creative powerhouse on a bland corporate website would probably fail to deliver its message.
Update title to Yamauchi No.10 Family Office crazy website or something
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
I would have ignored it, hid it, and probably flagged the submission without looking at the site if I had seen "The Craziest Website You Ever Did See" or some other hyperbolic clickbait bullshit.
The less marketing, the better.
The goal is to help readers figure out whether they’re interested not to “one crazy trick” or “you won’t believe #7” them into clicking through.
If you're interested in more detail, you can run spector.JS on the site to capture the render calls of a frame.
Still, I kinda miss the creativity of the early web.
Difficult, fraught projects battling with flash and unrealistic customer expectations.
Once live, never touched until entirely replaced by some new hotness.
https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379...
There is this link from the development agency. However its a bit hard to understand. It feels like they built their own rendering engine and then coded the animation on top of it...
Cool site still.
Can’t wait to get an M1 Mac.
https://y-n10.com/assets/sound/bgm.mp3
edit: 吉田 健二 Kenji Yoshida selected works: http://dajistudio.com/
The reason you don't hear about it is everyone is years behind on Japan stereotypes, and they shut everyone out again for pandemic management. But the "98% of Japan is Japanese" quote is not true (it actually means 98% Japanese citizens).
( I saw Godzilla! )
I'm happy someone is pushing for more innovation in Japan but ... there's huge issues
(1) Japanese people generally only speak Japanese. That tends to limit their reach to Japan only. Sure there are exceptions, I'm just saying it adds a hurdle. It also adds a hurdle to importing people.
(2) Japanese culture doesn't encourage sticking out. There's a reason one of the most famous Japanese sayings is "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down". Nearly ever part of Japanese is set against innovation. From the culture of "life time employment", the culture of "cram in high school for a college, party at college, arrive at job making $25k a year because you have no skills but company will train you, hired based on which school you went to". There's the "seniority issues where you're required to defer to anyone hired before you" (apparently that's even worse in Korea to the point my Korean friends say you can't ever truly be best friends with someone a few years old than you because you're required to treat them as your elder, not your peer). There's whole business legal issues where for all kinds of business transactions you're require to go to the local business administration office and have them print out officially stamped forms which you then submit it contracts etc..., You can add in the financial system here is not friendly to new ventures. I don't know where to point to how risk adverse things are here but I can point concretely for you to look at interest rates on savings accounts, certificate of deposit, etc to see it's vastly different than the USA.
(3) Japanese culture for various reasons still produces a much smaller number of career women. If you thought the representation of women in STEM (or pick your career) was low in some country in the west, it's 2-3-4-5x worse here. I'm not going to blame any particular thing but it is the current culture all around. The point is their missing a large pool of talent
(4) There's not much talent here. I don't mean that Japanese people are not talented, I mean rather it's impossible to hire talent. I have friends running companies and they can't find anyone even in Tokyo Metro (34 million people) and Osaka Metro (19 million people). Some of that is cultural, people don't switch jobs. Some of it is truly lack of talent (see education issue above), some of it is low salaries. Example: Top pay at Sony Japan for a software engineer is ~$70k. Most places pay much less. A few cash rich companies might pay more, (Cyber Agent, Mercari, are rumored to pay above $100k).
(5) If software engineers are the leaders of most innovation now, maybe they aren't, but if they are, Japan's attitude about them is they must be 21 to 35 and they are just replaceable cogs. After 35 they must be managers or else they move into some other field.
(6) Overtime is ridiculous
I actually think it's a good thing for Japan that inequality hasn't reached the crazy levels that we see in some other countries. But it certainly does make it hard for Japanese companies to attract top international talent the way FAANGs can.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1116124/japan-average-an... [2] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Japanese-CEO-pay-roughly-10...
It’s like the 1990s all over again
But it's definitely not the craziest website I've ever seen.