[mattnewton]

It’s more disappointing because I think people thought Nintendo was holding out on this kind of thing on principle. You had all the EA’s and Activisions of the world trying to replicate the economics of mobile casino apps in their AAA titles, but Nintendo was over in the corner still taking your $60 one time for a finished and complete game.

Now its pretty clear that they are happy to sell their AAA brand titles to the mobile casino people. And people worry that means that maybe Nintendo isn’t principled on this issue, just conservative and slow to adopt these things in the same way they were slow and conservative on online multiplayer. If that’s true, maybe soon after showing crazy profits this kind of crap is coming for all of their beloved franchises in mainline titles on Nintendo hardware.

[bentley]

Although it’s not their usual style of game design, this is not new even for Nintendo. The first blatant instance I can recall is Pokémon Picross (2015) on the 3DS, which was free to download, but unlike normal Picross, limited how many blocks you could fill in per day—of course, you could pay real money to get more. It was really a shocking cashgrab considering how high‐quality Nintendo’s previous Picross games were.

[mcphage]

> maybe soon after showing crazy profits this kind of crap is coming for all of their beloved franchises in mainline titles.

It's possible, but I'd worry more if it starts showing up on their own consoles, instead of mobile titles that exist mostly to get people interested in playing on Nintendo's own hardware.

Which isn't to say that Nintendo doesn't do weird things with DLC elsewhere—there was a 3DS game where you could purchase minigames with real money, but let you haggle with the seller in-game to get a better price.

[mattnewton]

That’s what I mean. I worry about DLC packs for the new Zelda that gate out core content instead of mostly supplemental stuff like the BotW dlc. You could imagine them selling the master sword DLC again and making some dungeons just not work without it because weapon durability is too low or something

[testplzignore]

This isn't even new for Nintendo. They get a large portion of the revenue from Pokémon Go (somewhere around 20%). The profit from that alone for Nintendo is probably north of $1 billion.

Much of that revenue likely comes from players buying egg incubators and raid passes, which both are essentially pay-to-win gambling. And just like Mario Kart Tour, there are hard caps on how much can be done per day without paying.

[krustyburger]

I somehow doubt Nintendo would be moving in this direction if Satoru Iwata was still at the helm.

[mxkopy]

Have you noticed that their old games are barely discounted from the price they were originally at when they released? Super Mario Galaxy is still $60, for example. I wonder if Pandora's box has been opened and everyone wants in on those insane P2W margins, or if the old way of doing things just isn't profitable anymore. And if the second option, why? Why don't they just charge $65?

[yamtaddle]

That's just Nintendo. Old games from other companies are still cheap, especially on platforms other than the Switch. PC in particular.

Nintendo's store also runs less-frequent and worse sales than others. Other stores, a two-year-old game might still be $50 full price, but it'll go on sale half-off multiple times per year. Not so much on Nintendo's store. Doubly so for first-party stuff. 20% off is a steep and rare sale for those, even older titles.

[mxkopy]

Well Nintendo also doesn't do microtransactions or DLCs. I'm sure if they did that they could afford more sales. I'm wondering if not having microtransactions is just not profitable anymore.

[yamtaddle]

Yeah, but other publishers that aren't heavy on microtransactions reduce prices more and have better sales, too. Though the other stores they sell through probably do get a lot of money through microtransactions, that's true.

I think the main factor's that Nintendo's got this weird cheap-on-the-hardware-side-premium-on-the-software-side thing going on. Which seems to be working for them—I'm not complaining, just observing, no other companies seem to have carved out a niche quite like that, so it's a distinctive characteristic of Nintendo.

[mxkopy]

> I think the main factor's that Nintendo's got this weird cheap-on-the-hardware-side-premium-on-the-software-side thing going on.

So do you think this is the weird economics that's responsible for Nintendo shifting more to the 'standard' model of DLCs and possibly microtransactions? Because selling the hardware doesn't make as much sense nowadays?

[yamtaddle]

Microtransactions are new and worrisome. DLC, they've so far treated more like traditional expansion packs (from what I've seen), rather than short-changing the core game so they can easily soak buyers for extra money for what should have been the full version to begin with, as has become standard practice in much of the rest of the industry. I didn't notice e.g. base Mario Kart coming with notably-few tracks or anything (we've paid for zero of the DLC for that, and have plenty of tracks, don't remember Double Dash or other older ones having more)

[bentley]

Nintendo has high‐profile DLC coming out this year for both Pokémon and Mario Kart.

[mxkopy]

Nintendo started doing DLCs after 2017. Which again makes me wonder if they're doing it because everyone else is, or some weird economics is making it unprofitable to not do it.

[pcstl]

I really don't see an issue with Pokémon moving to a DLC model. They're essentially replacing the updated rerelease they used to do (Platinum to Diamond/Pearl, Emerald to Ruby/Sapphire) with just releasing more content for the same game.

Mario Kart is also mostly course packs. Fun, but not vital.