Hacker News Reader

Comment by urza | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn't Nintento release their games to other platforms? I would love to play Zelda, but I am not going to buy a console just because of one game..

View on HN

Nintendo is just Nintendo, and enough people have bought a console just because of one game (or several games) for them still have enough money to keep being Nintendo.

I don't really want to defend them, but you need to look at the North American video game market crash of 1983 to understand their current stance. The entire video game market collapsed, because any old crap was being released as a game. Consumers lost confidence in the "platform" of specific games consoles. If they bought a home computer instead, there would still be games and it had other utility.

The NES was the antithesis of this. A walled garden of Nintendo, and plenty of first-party game development. The approach worked, it brought them fortune and made them a major player in the video game market. Why would they abandon this approach if it's still working for them almost 40 years later?

I think you're answering the wrong question. Parent post wanted to know why Nintendo doesn't want you playing their games on other people's hardware, you answered why Nintendo locks out other people's games on their hardware.

Nintendo has occasionally licensed out their brands for other hardware, but it's rare. Examples that come to mind are:

- Home ports of Donkey Kong, most of which came out before the NES

- Various Mario-branded edutainment games and typing tutors[0], which were available for IBM-compatible/WinTel PCs (probably also Mac OS but I don't remember)

- Phillips CDi games such as Hotel Mario and the two Zelda games it got[1]

- Nintendo's spinoff mobile games such as Super Mario Run, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, etc

A general unifying factor is that many of these were garbage. The mobile spinoffs are better, but those were made primarily to appease shareholders angry that the Wii U wasn't selling well. So I imagine Nintendo has had such a bad taste in their mouth from working with third party platforms that they'd rather just not. Furthermore, doing so means having to pay 30%, instead of receiving it from other developers.

[0] One of which was also Charles Martinet's first stint as Mario

[1] Notable for having lots of animated cutscenes that provided ample YouTube Poop material

I bought a Switch OLED to play Tears of the Kingdom, plus the game - $420 all in. If I could play it on my laptop which has a better screen and speakers, I would only pay $60. Plus, now I’m more likely to buy another Nintendo game to increase the utility of my new gizmo. As a business I’m pretty sure I’d rather have 7x the revenue.

Beyond what some of the other comments mentioned, Nintendo also took a different approach to their consoles compared to Microsoft and Sony which kind of forces them to lock down their first-party titles.

The Nintendo Switch is very underpowered compared to the other consoles of the same generation (PS4/5, Xbox Series X) but has a huge advantage of being the ultimate handheld / travel console. While Sony and Microsoft consoles can generally push out more FPS or better graphics (usually they lean towards better graphics), the Switch is very limited since it needs to strike a balance of form factor (less space for hardware) and battery life (what's the point of the handheld if you can only game for 30 minutes?).

For a big chunk of their user base, including the folks interested in these type of emulators and using them legally, they would probably prefer to use their other consoles and/or a PC/Mac from a pure performance perspective.

I also suspect that they would get less revenue per copy sold on other platforms compared their own platform, especially with games released by in-house studios.

With the above in mind, releasing a game on other platforms will cut into their revenue stream pretty significantly.

they are obsessed with trying to force there products to be only used roughly like intended

Or else they e.g. probably wouldn't patch out item duplication glitches which are close to impossible to accidentally ran into, or they would allow you to change control a age old basic features missing from Nitendo games instead you can only use controls in the intended (and play tested) ways. Similar they where quite obnoxious when it comes to streaming, reviews or other content containing game-play video for quite a long time. To some degree they still are.

Through for many people it's not just one game I mean Nintendo has quite a bunch of successful exclusive titles, to list some: Zelda, Mario Cart, Smash, various jump and run Mario titles you could split into 3D main titles and 2D complementary titles, Splatoon, Mario Party, Fire Embleme, Xenoblade, Kirby and more. In practice you tend to have at least 10 high quality enjoyable (but expensive) exclusive games. (ignoring Wii-U which flopped and leading to some strange results like Mario Cart 8 being republished with the DLCs pre-included and later a large expansion pass instead of releasing a Mario Cart 9).

You just answered your own question. :)

Want to play Zelda? You have to pay Nintendo at least $260. $100 more if you want to play on something better than a Switch Lite.

Unlike Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo actually makes a profit on their hardware sales as well as game sales.

Other console makers make a profit on their consoles as well. Typically it's either a small margin at the beginning, or maybe they're eating it somewhat, but as time goes on the components get cheaper, production is improved, or they make revisions to reduce complexity in the circuit boards, or they release a newer smaller version of the console as well. But it's not fair to say that Sony and Microsoft lose money on their console hardware but Nintendo doesn't.

The PS5 has broken even since 2001 by now it may be profitable

I would love to play Zelda, but I am not going to buy a console just because of one game

I'd pay a thousand dollars cash right now to be able to play Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom over for the first time. It's worth it.

However as someone who purchased BoTW and played it years ago on Switch, and again recentishly on CEMU, the experience on CEMU in 4k @60hz, it was a whole different game.

I’d pay Nintendo 3x the cost of ToTK to play a version that ran on my PC with improved resolution and frame rates. Until then, I watch the status updates for Switch emulators, and will play ToTK once emulation is reported to be ~perfect. I’ll buy ToTK, but I won’t be playing on hobbled Switch hardware.

What's the problem with your PC? I've been playing TotK on PC since before it launched and, after the rock-texture problem was fixed, high framerate and 4K work just fine. There's even a TotK mod manager now. Way better than my wife's experience on Switch.

I considered this, but I decided that the 100% confidence I had in a bug-free-experience (including crashes and risk of save-game loss) on the native hardware was worth the better experience I was likely to have at a higher risk playing on the MacBook M1 Ultra at 4k. I don't really regret it. My TV added "simulated HDR" and I played with frame-smoothing on for a simulated 120FPS. Yes there was latency but in this game it never mattered. Not even a little bit. I enjoyed every one of the 175 hours I spent in TOTK.

To each his own I suppose, but a crash every twenty or thirty hours is, to me, a fair trade for never having frame slowdown. Save-game loss is a non-thing. Even if you managed to kill the emulator while it was saving, every save is a separate file so you'd only lose the time since your last auto-save.

I guess I still see announcements of updates around bugs and edge cases. I'd rather be patient and wait for some thousands of other people to stumble across bugs for a while to minimize my chances of frustration. For video games, I'm only willing to do so much work for the experience. There are other domains where I'm happy to charge in first to file bug reports, but games aren't one. I assume I'll enjoy ToTK just as much next year or the year after, and even more so if I don't have to deal with any glitches.

I wish they made a TV-only pro with decent cooling so it can sustain 60fps. I’d buy that.

You'll get that feeling if you setup cemu and play botw at 60fps,4k or 21:9 native, etc

>but I am not going to buy a console just because of one game..

You might not but many millions do consistently.

This is actually super interesting because they have. In China they allowed Nvidia to ship a Wii emulator on the Shield.

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/08/nvidia_shield_shut...

What is really wild to me is that they could 100% ship Zelda for iOS and make a killing. The Switch has absolutely nothing on a modern iPhone/iPad, even heatsoaked and it would immediately be the best game on iOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com