Recently, Nintendo added the ability to write reviews for switch products on their site. While a common sight in many game platforms, it usually takes a little bit longer for Nintendo to catch on to industry practices (looking at you, backing up to the cloud). Hopefully, this can be seen as steps towards the modernization of Nintendo.
Nintendo makes some of the best games I have ever played. I would say it produces more classics by volume than any other studio, but they have one big problem. Nintendo does not understand how to be a good studio. One of the biggest events recently has been their obsessive need to take down content from Youtubers and Streamers unless they join their “Partner Program”. Mafia implications aside, they seem to have their mind stuck to the past, and will stick to old business practices religiously. This seems contradictory to their attitude towards consoles, as Nintendo consoles always have interesting and unique gimmicks you don’t see anywhere else. Hopefully Nintendo takes the jump into the 20th century with some recent changes.
The Nintendo Migration into the 21st century began when the switch launched. The Wii-U marked the beginning and end of what I would call the Dark Ages, as it was kind of a weird and rocky period for the publisher. The switch, however, is off to a much better start with some pretty amazing games, and with the Labo on the horizon, it seems like we are going to get some of-of that good old-fashioned Nintendo weirdness. Nobody quite operates like Nintendo, and from a hardware and software perspective, that is what has made them so successful. If we had another Microsoft or another Sony, it wouldn’t be as beneficial to the diversity of the industry. However, the time has come for Nintendo to modernize.
In the beginning, the switch was pretty archaic from a customer support standpoint. In its early weeks, you couldn’t even save your credit card information to the console. Now that has been remedied, and Nintendo is starting to allow for reviews to help guide players towards the good and bad games. Hopefully, we can see a lot more from the convenience perspective reaching the switch soon. The obvious next step would be allowing for accounts & data to migrate between consoles. Recently a journalist for IGN described how data for all of his games were lost when he had to send his console in for repairs. This simply shouldn’t happen in a day where you can store terabytes of data and files in services like Dropbox or google drive. I just hope to god things move quicker than they did for online accounts.
I love Nintendo. It is a fantastic company that produces hardware and software that continues to impress me. That being said, they need to upgrade their convenience and business practices if they want to keep me happy. More and more, the omissions in their convenience practices are becoming more glaring, and it is time for Nintendo to move into the 21st century. Hopefully, it is beginning, but we have a long way to go until they are caught up.
The Anxious Gamer 