Haruki_NLI

How the hell does a company racking in money hand over fist in multiple regions with some of the best hardware attach rates for games and profitability per title NOT show up on analysis?

In the same market as you?

No wonder Sony keeps burning money, their analysts are imbeciles.

It's like in my job, genuine hubris when a competitor closes for garden centers and they act like they have no competition only for the remaining very large competition to see US and go for the throat. It happened last year, it's happened this year, we've paid the price for that analysis twice now.

You ALWAYS have competition. You just need to recognize it before they see your weakness. If you didn't, the government would be on your behind.

@AverageGamer The Japan only Switch was only available at the My Nintendo Store, and Famitsu said it wasn't counted in these charts.

So this is just the retail available full price edition counted here.

@Scottyy checks notes

Dev cost is whatever 9 years of dev time is.

@Jamie64326 Yeah, even stuff like Super Mario Maker had Pokemon costumes that were sprites only, no sound effects or anything unique like the rest....which were again, largely other companies IP, and some not even gaming at all. Mercedez for gods sake!

TPC doesnt really play nice, and its quite obvious when you see all the mobile games and partnerships they do independantly without ever mentioning Nintendo. Sometimes I think they put some of those games on hardware because itd look odd if they didnt.

@Jamie64326 So it turns out I was slightly off, and that Nintendo gets an estimated 10%-20% of the game's revenue, simply out of licensing, though how that's been calculated I am unsure. But they also never mention it with their mobile stuff, so I imagine its quite a drop in the bucket.

TPC and Niantic will take the bulk of it regardless. However much TPC gives to each of its three stakeholders will be unknown given its privately owned and doesnt need to disclose that info.

Point being though, Pokemon is a bit of a weird oddity. Nintendo doesnt really get much of a say it feels like, especially when you hear that the CEO of TPC told Nintendo the Switch would fail and he'd rather just keep making games for 3DS and mobile.

They also had Pokemon amiibo for Smash: These infamously dont work in games. In Yoshi's Woolly World they give a generic amiibo t-shirt, but stuff like Cloud of all things gives a character appropriate costume. If SquareEnix is easier to license stuff from than a company you in part OWN, then you dont actually have that much influence.

I feel like the "But the pandemic" angle is a bit disingenuous, given the PS5 still had the launch record regardless of that, so everything that launched outside of a pandemic didnt do that well.

@Jamie64326 Nintendo has stated in their financial reports that Pokemon GO doesnt impact their revenue from the mobile sector. Despite the fact it should and does pull more money than Fire Emblem Heroes, it doesnt get counted, because they dont get any revenue from it. It all goes to TPC and Niantic.

@Juanalf They've been trying for years and most of the time its a critical meh and commercial bomb.

@UltimateOtaku91 Nintendo has no say in what GameFreak does with other publishers or internally.

In fact, GameFreak making a game for a Nintendo system by choice is.....almost unheard of. Everything they self published or did with other publishers wouldnt touch Nintendo hardware. They only do Pokemon because they own one third of the IP and the IP states main series games on Nintendo.

But weirdly, even then, Nintendo gets nothing from say, Pokemon GO, so if they really wanted to, they could probably put it on mobile instead.

@DonkeyFantasy I can think of why one of the extra features is missing from PS4.

Ah yes. The iconic start up sounds of the PS1 and PS2.

And the iconic startup sounds of the PS3 onwards: a beep.

Well, I guess we can say for PS5 this Physint.

I'll see myself out.

Nothing quite like a poll asking if we like and/or are playing DOOM to see if more DOOM guided and articles will bring in the clicks and that sweet sweet and revenue.

Yes. Yes I do. Upgraded the PC for this and Monster Hunter, and cant wait to start playing it....in two weeks after all this overnight work.

Adulting hard.

My only worry is that this may not be something that can be pushed as a software update, rather requiring more capable or different hardware.

@DennisReynolds If you look at data that's released monthly, consoles aren't the biggest piece of the pie anymore, anywhere in the world.

This is something Switch users have been dealing with for years.

LA Noire came on a cartridge with only 4GB available. The rest was a clearly marked download. Multiple games followed suit: 16GB but download the other 10GB.

The only time it made sense was say, the Borderlands Collection, where one game was on the cartridge, the others downloaded, but they were all seperate apps.

Then there's the download code in a box: no cartridge included at all. That's been going on for years. Or the games that were a cart and THEN a download code included.

Yeah Nintendo only offers 64GB cards now. Economies of scale. Produce big and only big, bulk costs come down.

If they offered a 16GB card we'd still be getting game keys regardless. Or half on card half download.

It's similar on PS5. Discs are slow. They need to install to the SSD to run. Publishers probably don't care how you get their game. You end up having to pop a key into your PS5 to play the game off the SSD once it's installed. To them, it doesn't matter.

So any way to cheap out is expected. Especially with $80 "early access" to get games at their actual launches, or physical copies that have to download the whole game anyway, or in app purchases, or DLC....maximise profits over everything else.

Sure, Sony or Nintendo could strong arm publisher's into not doing this. Absolutely.

But then the publishers will just go away.

It'll be $70, with $80 for an edition with the actual release date three days prior.

We've been paying $80 for years. It was just for "early access", or as we call it, the actual release date.

Much like how Rayman is a character from the Jaguar, and Lara Croft from the Saturn. The PS1 pilfered everyone in its conquest.

Also, quite odd its only the US dub included.

He's not planning to make it, but does in fact have a plan for it to be made.

Next he'll show up in bandages when DS3 is revealed.

I feel for em. Better hope this first game lands or else bye bye.

@PuppetMaster I'm not jealous, I live in the UK and like most of us have accepted that it isn't going to get any better and our wages at most hit £30,000 if we are lucky.

I'm just surprised there is a company out there that hasn't just hoarded the wealth at the top is all. When you see a story like this about how rich the guy is, it's usually at the expense of everyone else in the business.

But I'm happy to see that for once it's not.

@PuppetMaster Oh, what a surprise. A decent example of capitalism.

Also it wasn't a bet, it was 99.9% likely to be the case in this world we live in 🤣

What about the rest of the people who made the games though?

Bet they aren't so lucky.

This game has protagonists? All the game pages tell me is its a gacha with dungeon crawler elements, and all I ever see on social media is.....well you know what.

So hearing there are main protagonists is legitimately newsworthy.

@TheKurgan I dunno, I'm sure thats a problem once you get old enough.

I wouldnt go buying any of those second hand.

@Oram77 Of course it's flaming the community a bit. Switch 2 is stealing the gaming zeitgeist for a moment, so PushSquare needs clicks. The site is affiliated with Eurogamer and by extension DigitalFoundry, who is covering the Switch 2.

Money money money.

@StrickenBiged The irony is this is Alex Battaglia, who famously has nothing nice to say about Switch or consoles in general because he lives, breathes and adores only the finest purebred PCs.

That's if he says anything about them at all. The discussion videos usually amount to him saying "Neat but I dont care".

@Americansamurai1 Incredibly stepping out of the power race looks to have been the right move with how expensive games are to make now, in money and time, and how bloated they get after hitting the graphical ceiling.

Irony being that Nintendo got bodied by the PS2, which by far and away in terms of raw performance was laughable compared to its competition.

I think part of the problem is we've had Playstation fans banging on about how a low wattage handheld device being on par with a PS4 is a bad thing because the games won't look good, despite the games looking damn near identical in most cases to PS4, but apparently that means PS4 games look bad now? This was of course during the rumour phase of the hardware.

The other problem I think is Digital Foundry themselves have put such an immense focus on the tech and performance and how a game looks and basically saying dropping a frame here or there is bad, and it's become so loud that it's now gospel for the quality of a game online. Which it shouldn't be. But they've also never bothered to correct this as just one aspect of why a game is good or bad. They just state the facts and let the console wars use it as ammo, and make bank off of it.

And the final problem, and this will likely become evident as the generation goes on, is how comparing it to the PS4 isn't really the whole story. What we are likely to see is games performing like PS4, some like PS4 Pro and so on. It will be a spectrum and based on technology advancing it'll be quite a broad one too. Will we see PS5 level of detail and resolution with raytracing? No. Youre insane. But will we see stuff thats damn impressive and way above what a PS4 could have delivered, not just in resolution and frame rate (as Switch 2 already surpasses it on both fronts), but in gameplay features too.

All people spent years telling Nintendo was "Do it again but better in every way. We want voice chat, we want better controllers, better performance."

And in interviews they revealed that yes, that was the entire point, they went back and redesigned everything from scratch to do exactly what we, and developers apparently, wanted: the same but better. Developers are used to building for two different profiles now, so give them more power. Games banged on and on about performance, so give it more power.

And so they did that. Better controllers, beefier hardware, 4K support like everyone was asking for, enough performance to deliver games, up to 120fps built into the screen so developers have a reason to develop those modes because it's a guaranteed thing people have access to.

They still innovated. But it wasn't by flipping the table like they had to do with the DS and Wii.

Hell the Switch was hardly innovative. They even said most of the concepts came from older systems and things they did, just smushed together in one device. Even if you look at their games, the amount of games that went from SNES to GBA, N64 to DS, Wii to 3DS, you can see this is what they always aimed for: console performance on the go.

The only unique thing about Switch is how it presented it. Slap on haptic feedback and there you go. 20 years of ideas in a single box.

That's not an ero manga. Lies. Lies and slander.

And thus another reason to buy Nintendo hardware has dropped.

It's all on PlayStation now baby.

I think the....generous to call it apathy, let's say, towards Switch 2 means no one really cares.

They really want Persona fans to play a game other than 5 dont they.

$300 for a jacket. Then to complete the look you gotta spend another $300 on golf clubs. God. Nickle and diming.

@Bez87 And that's the perk of a free market. People are free to spend their money on the goods and services they deem worthwhile to them, at prices they deem acceptable, and others aren't at liberty to dissuade them.

Sucks but it's the best we got. Shame most of the world likes telling others how to spend their money eh? Or announcing that they are/aren't buying XYZ thing. At the end of the day, who really cares, what Jim, 40, from South Croydon spends his money on doesn't impact the random forum poster here saying it's overpriced and underpowered.

On topic, Switch 2 will likely be my secondary console. PC is my primary. PS5 is a good desk ornament for the rare game I can't get at better performance on PC.

See? Even I'm guilty of it. Society sucks lmao.

Well everyone wanted a more powerful system that can do 4K and run modern games and all that jazz. We've been banging on about it for years apparently. Funny how it turns out that might in fact be expensive.

Everyone wanted built in voice chat and now will just "stick with Discord". Ok, then WHY ASK FOR IT?

Consumers are some of the dumbest creatures in existence, banging on and on about how they want one thing, get it and then realise "Actually nah".

Virtual console was bad, it should be a subscription. Actually we want Virtual Console subscriptions are bad. We want a more powerful Switch that can do 4K. What do you mean its expensive?

Always assume the end user is an idiot, and remember they dont know what they want.

Switch tax. Switch tax.

Wait wrong system.

Eh, games have been coming with only a few megabytes of data on disc for years now. LA Noire did it on PS4. 4GB on disc. Game would fit on a Blu-Ray. They just didn't because then you'd force a download.

It'd be nice....if you're near a window with direct sunlight and don't mind cooking yourself while playing assuming your hands don't cover the sensors.

Then the other option is leaving it to visually degrade while it charges in sunlight.

Then imagine coming home and finding out it didn't charge because the weather turned.

This is great as a fringe option, because you won't beat just charging the damn thing normally, but if it was the only option you had? Nope. Plus it likely wouldn't be that cheap, and a more expensive way of charging an already expensive controller for what it is given how infamously s*** the battery is probably isn't gonna hit.

Plus, what PlayStation fans would buy this? We all know they don't see sunlight, PornHub reminds us yearly they are gamings biggest w******. You reckon they're going at the one handed rodeo on a windowsill?

@thefourfoldroot1 They were finished over 25 years ago. This is them not bothering to add an OS level feature for those sweet sweet endorphins people crave in this bleak society of desolation, live service and in app purchases.

Interesting to see Wilds sell most on PC, in terms of dollars.

Also weird to compare it to Rise, which launched on one platform and Capcom didn't share digital sales data due to it being on the eShop IIRC, rather than World, which did have accessible digital data and launched on two much bigger platforms at time of release (PS4/Xbone in 2017 Vs Switch in 2021).

@Carnage Sakurai helms a Mario franchise? Last I checked he's been independent for over 15 years and worked on Kirby, Kid Icarus Uprising (independently) and Super Smash Bros.

@Dragoon1994 They said Q1 2025.

Now whether that was calendar Q1 or fiscal Q1 we dont know.

That's definitely a day to choose.

@Bramble @nessisonett So I just took a quick look on social media - its all porn, so thats not giving me answers. So to the old Wikipedia I go and....3 paragraphs on the gameplay, one stating context for the gameplay in world, one stating 2D Dungeon crawler and 3D action hack and slash (No elaboration on either), and then one mentioning there are Combo attacks and a time of day system.

The rest of the several thousand word article is then on story.

I'm starting to think this might be a choose your own adventure book.

@johncalmc It's Zenless Zone Zero. Rizzless Region Renumerated. ZZZ.

No idea what the game actually is. All I ever see is porn, scantily clad women (And men), and people talking about pulls. At no point have I actually heard anything about.....the game....part of this video game.

Then again, this is also the same people (I assume people, could be AI with the way they're churning stuff out) that made Genshin Impact, which I at least know is some kind of open world thing, and Honkai Star Rail, which much like this, all I know of it is absolutely massive Honkais. Huge badongas.

Seriously I have no damn idea what these games are and no one actually seems to ever report on that. Just new waifus are available now and jiggle physics of a cat's KP nuts.

Oohhh now I understand why I didn't get one. I've been making good financial choices.

Like not having kids and becoming a Dad.

I jest.

I though that was Densetsu no Stafy 2

Liquid Snake.

Wait no.

Solidus Snake.

No that's trademarked.

Naked Snake? Damn.

Uh...Flaccid Pancake.

Not super high, given it still runs rough for no reason for a game that looks as it does on a higher end PC, and its absolute insistence to not let you off the leash for hours upon hours, even when Rise let you do everything with other players from very early on, is baffling.