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Comment by thatguy0900 | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo might not release cutting edge hardware, but they're pretty much the only big video game company left that doesn't openly release half finished games with the intention to maybe fix them a few months later.

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they also seem to be the least guilty of adding microtransactions to everything. Although I haven't kept up with nintendo devices, so I'm not sure if this is still as true on the switch.

This stopped being true with the Switch.

Gonna need sources on that claim

Super Mario Party was not up to their content standards—the minigames were good, but there were only 4 boards, and they were both tiny and dull. Animal Crossing is a mixed bag—it has stuff previous entries don't, and is missing a lot that previous entries contained. But that might have gotten derailed due to Covid. The Mario Golf game that just came out supposedly has minimal content too, but I haven't played it.

On the other hand, it's not universal—New Pokémon Snap is a sequel to a game that could be completed in ~5 hours, and is absolutely filled with content.

. . . That's not what people mean when they say "half finished". It's when a game with a defined scope fails to meet that scope. You might not like the dearth of content with those titles but there is no indication that they were ever meant to go beyond what was provided on release.

I certainly can't speak to what their defined scope was—generally Nintendo doesn't specify, and when they do say something—like saying Animal Crossing was designed to have "two or three years worth of content"—there's no indication what that actually means. All I can speak to is, when playing a game, does this game feel complete and finished? Traditionally Nintendo has been pretty good about that. Recently, not so much. I've been playing Mario Party since the late 90s, you develop a feel for what Nintendo considers a complete release. Whether that's changed intentionally not, is pretty immaterial.

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