[slg]

>Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product.

And yet I can't think of a single large corporation that actually has this mindset anymore. The current mindset of management is that any delight your customers take in the product is a sign that either the price should have been higher or costs cut until the product is merely satisfactory rather than delightful.

[barry-cotter]

Nintendo, Studio Ghibli, Cartoon Saloon. I’m sure there are many others in creative industries since you have to delight customers at least some of the time there. A large part of the reason Nvidia is a big deal is that they were willing to make the best drivers, that they just cared more about making a quality product. Lots of companies well exceed minimum quality necessary to keep customers from switching.

[cardanome]

Nintendo is changing. Switch 2 is outdated over-priced hardware with super expensive games. Not to mention always being extremely hostile to fans and draconically enforcing their copyright. With their recent software patent trolling they are on their way to become the Japanese Oracle.

Nvidia has garnered a lot of hate from the gaming community. Completely dishonest marketing, purposefully gimped hardware that barely gets enough RAM to function. Everyone wishes there would be more competition in this space.

Sure some studios still care about their customers but any huge corporations is bound to become a rotting corpse of its former self over time.

[danudey]

> Switch 2 is outdated over-priced hardware

Per most reviewers (e.g. Digital Foundry), the Switch 2 is expensive but not over-priced for what you get (unless what you get is motion sickness from the overdriven LCD display).

There's a stark difference between "expensive" and "overpriced". A lot of people have said over the years that Apple's laptops were "overpriced", when what they really meant was that they could get something good enough for their needs for lower prices. Lots of people still bought them because it was worth it to them.

Likewise, the Switch 2 is expensive, and it is not worth it to everyone, but for a lot of people it's not "overpriced"; I would point to the Switch 2's sales numbers as the fastest selling console in history to indicate that most people don't seem to feel the same way.

> with super expensive games.

Correction: every other gaming platform has super cheap games. If game prices had kept up with inflation since I was a kid playing on the NES, we'd be paying well over $100-120 for games these days. They're definitely more expensive than other games, but (as one example) if I play Mario Kart World half as much as I played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe then I'm getting better value for my money than almost any other entertainment I've ever paid for.

Again, not worth it to everyone, but not unreasonable also. It sucks, but still.

[slg]

Gaming being a relatively cheap hobby doesn't change the fact that Nintendo is using its market position to raise prices in a coldly capitalistic way that obviously saps some of the "delight" their customers would normally experience.

[kibwen]

Profit motives inherently optimize for consistent, regular, barely-acceptable slop. In order to optimize for quality, you need people to take pride in their work, and not merely take a profit.