#customerandservice — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #customerandservice, aggregated by home.social.
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Nintendo games and consoles are for adults now, the expanded media for children
I end up reading quarterly reports now and then from Capcom and Nintendo, and outside few posts I let them go by. They are usually full of non-answers, but there are gems here and there. My favourite is the knowledge that when Square and Enix merged, the surviving company was Enix. This trips a lot of Square fans who don’t realize how badly Square was suffering in terms of finance back then. The Spirits Within movie had inflicted lasted damage to the company and was the main reason why the merger was delayed. Enix was in a much better position.
Nintendo’s 85th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders is more of the same. There’s a question about if the Switch 2 supply is meeting with the demand, but there’s a non-answer. Nintendo doesn’t know, it’s been on the market too short a time. Which is also why Nintendo had to shoot down reports about those five million units sold too. 3.5 million is what Nintendo is saying. That’s still a good number and there is room for growth, but be either the price or the supply, Nintendo has already changed their strategy.
Q12:
Nintendo Switch 2 has a higher price point than past platforms like the Family Computer system
(Famicom). I am concerned that this might reduce opportunities for young children to engage with
it. How will you address this issue?
A12 Furukawa:
We believe the pricing of Nintendo Switch 2 is appropriate for the gaming experience it offers,
and what is most important is to provide entertaining experiences that demonstrate the value to
consumers. To achieve this goal, we have incorporated various features into Nintendo Switch 2.
It is true that Nintendo Switch 2 has a higher price point than our past gaming systems. We are
creating various opportunities outside of our gaming systems for young children to engage with
Nintendo characters and game worlds, with one of the ultimate goals being that they will eventually
play on our gaming systems. We are closely monitoring to what degree the price of the system
might become a barrier.Nintendo acknowledges the Switch 2 is beyond most children at the moment. The reason Nintendo has the reputation of a family friendly, kids console is because they appealed to the whole family, not just kids or the parents, or the shut-in hardcore gamer in the basement. This explains the Switch 2’s design and addition of using the controllers as computer mice. The more muted colours of the console are there to make the console look less like a toy, the colours pop less. It’s the more mature option of the two, and keeping the Switch on the side might be a crutch solution to deliver games to children who can’t move on to the newer system.
This didn’t really work for Sony, as the PlayStation 5 ended up being largely a noteworthy console for it being about nothing. Sony let the PlayStation 4 live too long and had cross-system games draining any reasons to migrate to the newer system. Constant multiplatform games despite of their timed exclusivity damaged to console on the long run to the point of PS5 being irrelevant. I would’ve bought the system for Final Fantasy VI if it had anything else I would’ve wanted to buy, but PS5 has a very lacklustre library.
We are creating various opportunities outside of our gaming systems for young children to engage with Nintendo characters and game worlds, with one of the ultimate goals being that they will eventually play on our gaming systems. We are closely monitoring to what degree the price of the system might become a barrier. Nintendo seems to know that the price is too much. More importantly, they are intending to leverage other media to sell to kids. Nintendo has always had cartoons, comics, cereals and other mulimedia ventures next to their games, but they’re ramping them up now because of the Switch 2’s status as a high-price, prestige system. The Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda movies are an example of this, and these are kids movies. They’re also doing more concerts, which aren’t exactly for children but for Nintendo Adults, equivalent of Disney Adults.
That’s the main target audience for the Switch 2; people who grew up with Nintendo and are now between thirty and fifty, with enough income to put down enough cash without thinking too much whether or not the system warrants its high price. Nintendo acknowledges in this QA that the Switch 2 wasn’t priced high because of inflation. Because of this higher set price, Nintendo has created other opportunities for children (and people who can’t or won’t buy the Switch 2) to consume their properties in other media forms, aiming to make those emotional connections that are so important in keeping long-term, lifelong customers that won’t question much of the corporation’s actions and decisions. Some call these true fans, others call them more accurately as sycophants.
Can Nintendo make their business plan succeed without the larger children as their main target market, or will the Nintendo Adults be enough? Too early to tell, but this feels like abandoning a long-lasting and successful approach for something the corporate body got told by the shareholders.
QA14 more or less confirms what’s already said earlier. Based on our strategy of expanding the number of people who have access to Nintendo IP, since the launch of Nintendo Switch, we have pursued parallel development in mobile apps, theme parks, movies, and official stores. These are now in place. These all eat Nintendo’s general budget and I have to question if they’re a good direction for a combined hardware and software provider. Spreading yourself too thin might cost them back. Are they intending to become some sort of Asian response to Disney?
Lastly, there are repetition about concerns over rising game development costs. Let’s kick that dead horse again and remind that nobody but the publishers and developers are ultimately responsible of these. Very few big name publisher/ developer produces smaller budget games with less high-budget fat. Just look at how successful Mega Man 11 has been for Capcom with a very modest budget, yet Capcom hasn’t put out a new Mega Man game because that’s not how they roll. Nintendo could similarly put out tighter budget games more often, hitting that 16-bit SNES nostalgia with sprite based Zelda or Mario and they’d make a bank. We’re not in the late 1990s-early 2000s anymore. If the Indie boom of the New Millennium showed anything, we’re well pass the Oooh Aaah 3D phase. 3D has become mundane long time ago and consumers have accepted how it was absolutely silly to shun 2D games after the launch of the PlayStation. Nintendo has leveraged their 2D roots many times over the years, but have never done a new and true 2D game with a proper budget on their flagship console. Hence, why the indies deliver some of the best stuff out there still.
#customerAndService #gaming #Nintendo #videoGames #videogames
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Want to own the games you buy in the future and have them accessible after the publisher ceases support? Do you live in a European country that’s party of the EU? Then you can help by signing this initiative.
Stop Killing Games. The project has a goal; have games in functional state at the end of their life. Lot of games already have this built-in. However, every game that requires always-online functionality has a high probability of just dying on you. You won’t get to play the game because the publisher doesn’t support it anymore. The game’s obsolescence is built-in, planned to get you off that game and move to another product of their. Shut up and consume products, you have no right to this license. I don’t think many will agree with my take here, but this is something I want to get out of my system. Give the above links a read if consider the idea of Stop Killing Games a good one.
I hate the idea of government needing to tell companies to stop being abusive towards their customers. However, current laws across the globe largely benefit the companies, as they’ve had lobbyists doing that for them. The balance of power between consumers and corporations is grossly unbalanced. Consumers are expected to pay up and be happy to own nothing.
Therefore, you go in bed with the devil yourself in the best way you can. This EU Initiative is not making a law. It can be a start for a ruling. It’s a far shot, as members of the EU parliament are largely clueless idiots, who don’t read the papers and rulings they vote on. These parliament members are informed by their assistants, whose job is to read through these papers and help to make informed voting decisions. Of course, these assistants have their own agendas and will mislead the parliament members if they want.
I have no love for the EU, but this is a chance consumers can’t really sit on. On the long run, this isn’t just about having all video and computer games independently functional. This is also about ownership and license purchases work. There’s only a net positive if purchasing a license would end up equating to purchasing a physical product. Think it much like buying a music CD. You own that particular copy of the CD, but not the intellectual property on it. That’s your copy to do what you want with, even sell it to someone else. We should have the right to sell digital goods we’ve bought. The only reason you can’t is because the gaming industry might lose revenue from that. Again, the teeter-totter is against the consumer.
If this initiative would pass and the ruling would require publishers to ensure games would be in a reasonably working condition, it would also make a precedent for other industries. For example, a music player that requires an always-Online connection to the provider servers might be required to ensure the player would still work after they drop support and close the servers down. This naturally ties to Right to Repair, where customers fixing their own stuff to make them work again would be that much easier and simpler if the companies wouldn’t fight them to tooth and nail.
Unlike some buzz on the Internet about this initiative solely being to kill Live Service model games, that’s not the case. Live service games would be heavily impacted, but that’s just because they’re inherently anti-consumer. The core audience of video games have been treated like trash for long enough, and if this initiative doesn’t pass, and then hit its intended target, the industry will end up even more draconian. In no part of history has an industry looked at itself and considered whether or not they’re going too far. Instead, they’ll plough straight through into injuring other consumer protection laws and then decimate them through lobbyists and gerrymandering.
The game industry won’t stop the bad, anti-consumer practices and standards they have going on wilfully. It’d be nice if they’d start being consumer friendly and transparent, yet only a few developer and publisher ever seems to go for that. Instead, there have been even more layers obfuscating the separation between the consumers, developers and publishers. It doesn’t help that the gaming media is just another arm of the publisher PR machine. Hype the Big Game, buy the Big Game and a year later the Big Game is announced a disappointment after million dollars initial sales. There’s no monetary benefit for the industry to be pro-consumer, not at this point. Some talking heads have raised worries of this initiative opening publishers and developers for abuse from the consumers, but that’s goddamn rich talk when the industry is openly abusing its customers. To be make a very extreme point, anyone who sells you something should be treated with high suspicion, like they’re a drug seller trying to sell you bad juju instead of the good and pure stuff.
The initiative isn’t perfect and is intentionally rather vague. There are tons of stuff that can’t be pinpointed down until the later by the parliament starts their discussions on the topic. Some people want to know the details how these games would be kept functional. All that minutia would just slow down the conversation, and in the end, that’s up to the developers. Be it allowing consumers to access server binaries or built a multiplayer-only game to have AI opponents, that’s fully on the developers to figure out as far as I’m concerned. Every industry rejects and fights change that’s for the customer, but just like how car manufacturers nowadays have seatbelts, the game industry will too adjust and design games to be accessible in the future as well.
Future being the keyword, as it wouldn’t be fair to grandfather in games that have been already published and abandoned. I would include games that are currently active and live, e.g. Street Fighter 6 wouldn’t just go poof after Capcom shuts the servers down.
Which of course begs the question about console games. The Big N, MS and Sony would need to provide some method to access certain online functions after they drop support on their consoles. For example, they could patch the Wii to have an option to access a custom server that can run online-only game. Or maybe an older example, Capcom would need to offer a way to access Online-only quests in the original Monster Hunter. Not that either examples would be grandfathered in, they’re just examples. Still, that’s mostly beside the point. The minutia of how comes after.
It shouldn’t be any surprise that I support this initiative. Everything that’s pro-consumer, pro-Right to Repair and pro-ownership is only a net good thing. Anything that empowers individual more and allows individual rights and freedoms to be expressed without oppressive corporate oversight is one step toward a brighter future.
#customerAndService #customerService #electronicGames #games #gaming #videoGames #videogames