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Phil Spencer: "getting [acquiring] Nintendo would be a career moment for me"; Nintendo's future "exists off of their own hardware"
(www.resetera.com)
Archive link: https://archive.ph/NF2r0
At some point, getting Nintendo would be a career moment and I honestly believe a good move for both companies. It's just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time.... :-)
The newer XBox consoles are x86 architecture devices with an operating system that is similar to Windows. If they can maintain retrocompatibility with older titles, that means they have a functioning emulator or compatibility layer for classic XBox and 360 games. It would be trivial for Microsoft to release them for PC but they don't seem interested in doing that. Whatever obstacles there may be there, they are not technical. Considering that, it's unlikely that they would take a different approach regarding older Nintendo titles.
The example of Age of Empires II if anything indicates that they want to have a console-centric approach towards older titles. So, it's just speculation to assume that Microsoft acquiring Nintendo would lead to their games being ported to PC. On the flipside, I'd be more concerned that Microsoft's more inconsistent quality standards and monetization tendencies would make their way into Nintendo titles.
It also isn't trivial. They had to write custom emulation code for those old games, and they had to negotiate that with the rights holders in a lot of cases.
Right, as opposed to the flawless technical quality of the latest Pokemon games and the impeccable business model of tying games with a killswitch behind a subscription model?
I'll just say again that, for me personally, I'd rather see almost anyone else run Nintendo, because they're a good chance I'd find that entity to be less shitty. But maybe the better alternative is for them to just screw up the successor to the Switch and take a bath on it financially.
All that applies to Nintendo titles, especially the latter. If they don't manage it for the titles they already have for which they already did the technical work, Nintendo on PC seems even more unlikely.
I expected for you to bring up Pokémon, and in all fairness I agree that it was released in an unacceptable state. But I should remind you that The Pokémon Company and Game Freak are separate companies that work differently than other first-party Nintendo titles. Could you honestly tell me that Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Animal Crossing and all other Nintendo franchises are anything but excellent? People may have their preferences and dislikes about them, but it would be dishonest to say they aren't all finely crafted.
I agree with you as far as their attitude towards Mario 35, but what do you think is going to happen to Sea of Thieves once they decide to take the servers down? This is not something that Microsoft is going to fix, it's the pitfall of all live service games, and as time goes by gaming companies only seem to insist more on this direction.
I don't agree with Nintendo with everything, their online platforms are lacking, their closedness is disappointing, their litigiousness is often revolting, but I definitely wouldn't trust Microsoft or Sony to do better, even less any other gaming company.
I can tell you that I find the frame rate and resolution of Zelda to be unacceptable, given that they don't allow any option for that game to run on other hardware, legally. I've heard enough complaints from my girlfriend to know how little they cared about Animal Crossing in the online experience (a minute and a half connection screen every time someone joins your island!) or the UX (manually hitting A over and over to craft something thirty times that you should be able to do in bulk). Smash's online could have been done right this time, but they took the cheap way out instead of properly developing it with rollback. Their voice chat solution is to hook up your phone with an app and use it separately rather than baking it into the device's OS. I would call all of these poor quality and unacceptable.
So then why does Microsoft frighten you when Nintendo already does the shitty thing of their own accord? The stuff they do with their online catalogue of retro games is the shitty thing no one else is doing. Remember that Microsoft had a great remaster of Goldeneye ready to go for 360 that Nintendo denied in the 11th hour, and when that game finally came out again, it's only available in subscription services rather than for purchase, both the Switch and Xbox versions were worse than that remaster, and only the Switch version had online play.
The only reason I trust Microsoft and Sony to do better, even by a smidge, is because they actually respond to market forces, and Nintendo would rather go bankrupt than sell you a ROM of Super Mario Bros. for $8 on PC. But Microsoft isn't acquiring them anyway. Buying Activision closed that door, so all of this is moot.
C'mon, I can't take it seriously if you are going to overblow it like this. Tears of the Kingdom is a marvel of engineering and losing sight of that because it's not running on the most powerful gaming hardware is a huge disservice to the work put into it. It's a superficial way to judge them and it only makes me give less credit to your opinion. It just make you sound like the sort of gamer who would prefer a hyper-realistic generic game running at 4K 60 FPS than anything with passion, who has no appreciation for a more modest game that is finely crafted.
Both Animal Crossing and Smash Ultimate too, like I said, the online is disappointing, but they are still excellent games both single-player and couch multiplayer. To call it "poor quality" and "unacceptable"? If you really mean it then I just don't trust your opinion. Listing such a small nitpick as Animal Crossing's UX in that is downright silly. All of these games are fun, beautiful and even technically impressive for a limited hardware like this.
This is not me being a blind fan. I have played plenty of Animal Crossing and I've seen those issues. There are things in it that I'd wish were expanded or brought back from previous entries, but I can put that into perspective, considering how much content in it is new or much more polished than before. To deem it "unacceptable" because of that, the person must not have played any real bad games.
I'm not keen on it but I'm also not overly concerned about how Nintendo offers older games now because I know how to get them. And so does anyone who really care about this really. As for Mario 35, I definitely don't like that, but this sort of approach is rare for them and left to smaller, niche projects. As opposed to Sea of Thieves which is the only thing we still hear of Rare in years. In fairness, I don't think it's an excuse, but I'll lament the loss of Sea of Thieves far more than those other games, especially considering I can still play Mario, F-Zero and Tetris regardless.
Microsoft and Sony responding to market forces is exactly why I want Nintendo out of their hands. Because if those two get a pass to rip off the player, they won't even hesitate. Look at Microsoft did to Forza. Bungie is now Sony's and look at what Destiny 2 is like. The market often leans towards cheap profiteering. Nintendo is maybe overly self-important, and for that reason it keeps trying to deliver quality with a self-respect that other companies are already shoving out of the door. With the exception of Pokémon, a Nintendo game is guaranteed to be a good game and a complete package.
I'm sure it would be a marvel of engineering if they got it working on the 3DS running at 15 FPS in 120p, but I don't find it acceptable to play at those specs either. They can put all sorts of work into making something unacceptable. If it sucks, it sucks. I frequently don't care about the biggest AAA releases, and it's not a requirement that every game I play pushes hardware to its limits. However, I do care about responsive controls, playing where I'm comfortable, and not having to squint to tell what I'm looking at. Making a game of the scope they targeted isn't comfortable for me on the only hardware they allow it to run on.
What is there to trust? It's my opinion, not yours, and you've played those games yourself to form your own opinion. Maybe you don't care about a best-case input delay of 6 frames in Smash or that extremely common actions in Animal Crossing that you'll be doing hundreds of times are made more tedious and add more downtime, but it has a huge effect on me and mine.
Market forces are currently driving a lot of games toward live service, planned obsolescence, and all that nonsense. Totally true. Bungie was fully capable of making a gross live service even when they weren't under pressure from Activision or Sony. But market forces are also going to eventually make them stop, as we're finally picking up momentum on customers pushing back against this sort of thing. With or without Pokemon, Nintendo's name on the box has never been a guarantee of a good game, and it's not true now either.
Well, overexaggeration aside, I still appreciate many 3DS games to this day. This rush for the latest and greatest is part of what fuels planned obsolescence. Really, it feels a little inconsistent to criticize them for how they offer older games if you can't bear a game that's even a little bit aged.
I can grant you that Nintendo online kind of sucks but offline Nintendo games tend to be some of the most responsive, due to not letting too much realism get in the way of game feel, as well as the most readable, due to clear contrast and vibrant colors. Zelda or any other, I can tell everything apart very easily in Nintendo games, either portable or a big screen. Something games with much higher resolution often fail to do. Excessive shading and clutter often gets in the way of readability in the Sony games I played, no matter how much more defined objects look.
I even agree preference-wise with the Animal Crossing criticism, making bait is kind of a chore, but I also understand that the game's design is deliberately intended to slow the player down. It is a chill game to take it easy, not a game to rush and optimize everything. This is not a flaw, it's a difference in intent. This is what I believe weakens your arguments the most, you can't seem to diferentiate from something you don't like and something done badly.
Something I dislike is bad. I dislike things because I subjectively find them to be bad. But don't confuse poor performance with being old. We've done 60 FPS long before 2017, but they didn't make it a priority for Zelda. They didn't even seem to care about making sure 30 FPS was stable. The game they made is too big for that hardware to ever hit that metric, or the native 720p that the Switch supports. Metroid Dread, on the other hand, doesn't break a sweat.
It's objectively a flaw in an interactive game to remove interactivity for a minute and a half on a frequent occurrence like someone joining or leaving an island, and I think you'd have a hard time finding someone who thinks manually crafting the same item 30 times in a row rather than being able to do it in bulk is somehow better for the vibe the game is going. It's not my preference for weapons to break as quickly as they do in Zelda, but at least I understand why they made that choice, and it's not a fault of the quality of the software. It would be objectively better for Smash Ultimate to have less input delay and be more responsive. People have measured it at 6 frames, and Street Fighter V had a rough time back when it had 8. 3 or 4 is manageable. The most responsive fighting games have 1 or 2.
I dislike good things. I dislike Dark Souls, a game made with vision and care that a lot of people love, because to me it looks ugly, feels clunky and just utterly miserable. But sometimes you have to understand that things are not made for you specifically. Yeah, subjectively it is bad for me, but it's also good overall, no matter what I feel about it.
If Tears of the Kingdom was a native 1080p 60 fps game, it wouldn't have a whole system of physics-based interactive modular devices. Game developers are amazed that Nintendo even managed to get such complex systems running. Of course it's more demanding than Metroid Dread, does anything in it even remotely compare? That game doesn't even need to render distant landscapes, it's all small rooms and predetermined backgrounds. Do you think that was a lack of wanting to make it happen?
Maybe if a new console comes along and it's ported to that it will run better and look better, but for now, everything it can do comes at a cost.
I already acknowledged and agreed with you that Nintendo's online is bad. But there's more to those games than that. Aside that aspect though, what about Smash's gameplay, visuals, music? It's not like that game is only playable online, and thank goodness for that.
What about the variety and detail of Animal Crafting's clothing and furniture, or the behaviors of the villagers, or how customizable is the island this time around?
Ugly, clunky feeling, miserable games are things you'd find to be bad. You don't have to acknowledge that other people like it if you find it to be bad. You can just say you think it's bad, at least with a clarification of why, or understand that when I say something is bad, it doesn't mean you can't like it, especially since I clarified why. I'm not obligated to say that something is good just because other people like it.
It could on hardware that they don't legally allow me to run it on! And that they don't let me do so is bad.
No, I said that it was for lack of designing a game that can run well on the hardware they restricted themselves to. And if we were still in the 2017 world where the Switch is the only way to play a game that demanding portably, or even here in 2023 where it would be the cheapest way to play a game that demanding portably, it would be acceptable, but not when it's the only way to play the game at all.
I love Smash. But I also don't live in a dorm room anymore, and online is the primary use case for most fighting games. I go to locals, but if I get my ass beat at a local and go home to practice, my way to practice it is to go online, and its online sucks. Having bad online in a multiplayer game these days is about as bad as not having subtitles in a story-driven game or missing any other standard feature. The input delay is also rough even when you play locally.
I'm not the target market for Animal Crossing, so don't worry about what I think of it. My girlfriend was the one who played it. I played that first one on the Gamecube, and even back then I eventually became a little grossed out by how they wanted to make that game a habit like mobile games do today by making you afraid of weeds piling up. I do feel pretty confident in evaluating how bad those two aspects are when I could frequently walk through the living room and see the same few flaws over and over again.
If Nintendo games weren't trying to sell you on a console, do you really think they'd be trying so hard?
I'm old enough to remember the Dreamcast era Sega and their output after that. Sega's software teams went fucking hard trying to create awesome new experiences that you could only get on Sega's console. Their output quality dropped considerably and they played it boringly safe after they dropped out of the console market.
It's interesting that your example is Dreamcast, because while every company that doesn't put out a console also has an incentive to make great games, this also shows that making great games isn't enough.
Kind of. A big part of Sega's situation is that they shot their reputation in the ass with a 12 gauge in the mid 90s. They were pumping out platforms left, right and center only to discontinue them within a year or two (Sega CD, 32X, Saturn).
Nintendo have been very careful not to make the same mistakes, but even then a lot of people initially had little faith in the Switch because of the WiiU. Even Gamefreak didn't want to release Pokémon games for Switch initially.
As for other companies, their goal is to make titles that sell well on the platforms it releases on. They can afford to rely almost completely on what has come before, all they need to do is do it well.
The goal of a first party game is to sell itself and the platform. So they need to be doing things that other games aren't, in order to sell the idea of 'you can only get this experience with platform X'.
I think this is the exact idea that Sony and Microsoft realized doesn't make financial sense anymore, and that Phil expected Nintendo to come to late.
Phil Spencer of Microsoft thinks this idea doesn't make sense because they haven't been doing it well in years. The big innovation with Halo Infinite is live services and an open world. Their exclusives aren't doing anything other games aren't.
Sony is a bit better and covers a few more genres, and if you're into heavily-cinematic games, Playstation is your no-brainer choice, they've got you covered in all sorts of genres. And they've got the Spiderman games.
Nintendo, meanwhile practically owns the kart racing genre. There is literally no other AAA effort that isn't cash in crap or loaded up with so much MTX crap that even Fortnite would blush.
Mario Oddesey might have a bit more competition nowadays but in 2017, your only options were Oddesey, a (very good) indie game, and a neutered reboot of Ratchet and Clank.
Breath of the Wild came at a time when most open world games were very rigid when it came to how players dealt with tasks and enemies. BoTW gave players a lot more options thank simply going in quiet or loud, and ToTK took it much further. They practically changed how other companies look at open world games.
Nintendo puts AAA efforts into entire game genres that most other companies ignore entirely, even if the audiences do not. This is how they've maintained crazy Switch sales.
Sony's games are on PC now. Final Fantasy restricted itself to PS5 and underperformed. Games that those platforms use to sell their platforms also come out on PC because they just cost too much to make, and there are too few of them because of how long they take to make now. Nintendo generally spends less, but they're still running into the same problem with development time, and that means their exclusive offerings will dwindle as they have to ramp up fidelity on more powerful hardware, just like what happened with Sony and Microsoft, which means fewer and fewer games that can only be played on that specific set of hardware. Third party exclusives mostly disappeared because, for the same reasons, restricting yourself to one platform is generally a stupid idea these days.
As an aside, racing games in general are rare these days, not just kart racers. My options are Mario Kart, sim racers, one step down from a sim racer like Forza Horizon, and little else. I like racing games, but not any of those. The market will come back around; I've got Trail Out right now and Aero GPX in the near future that will hopefully tide me over until someone makes racing games for me again.
Years after their playstation debut. Because they know that people who want to play AAA games on a PC do so for reasons the PlayStation platform just doesn't cater to, thus they aren't exactly competing. That and porting costs are reasonably minimal, so it's money on the table.
Do you really think the PC market is that big that it'll plug a shortfall like that?
Xbox initially only did it because both platforms were controlled and toll-collected by Microsoft (I'm talking specifically about Windows Store, they only put their stuff on Steam much later).
That's not what Square's been saying.
The switch has about 98 first party games, and isn't exactly slowing down. That's not counting third party exclusives, either.
Nintendo generally gets around this by having certain third parties develop its first party games. It also acquires some of these studios to develop these titles. Smash was a Bandai Namco game. Mario + Rabbids is a Ubisoft game. Hyrule and Fire Emblem warriors were made by Team Ninja and Omega Force.
Nintendo also has one more reason not to port: there is much less customer mutual exclusivity between switch and other platforms as there is between Xbox, PS and gaming PC. That is, a person who has one of the three is unlikely to have one of the other two, but may have a Switch for portable gaming.
Do you realize how large the PC market has become? Games that used to only be available on consoles now sell more on PC than any single console.
Hmmm. I did some research on a few games and you are surprisingly correct. However, I did notice something else too.
Nintendo doesn't need extra sales numbers from PC. Their games sell record breaking amounts while being exclusive. Of the top 50 best selling games of all time, 7 are Nintendo games that are either Switch exclusives or WiiU ports, where they did much better on the Switch. Sony, in total, has 1, and Microsoft, in total, also has 1 (2 if you count Minecraft, as they bought Mojang during the latter's heyday). Half of that list is Nintendo.
That's true, but again, I think they're going to run into more resistance with development time as they upgrade their hardware and the art assets have to rise to meet the new spec and the new audience expectation. Those Wii U ports had the benefit of being ports, which is a situation that will never happen again. Since basically no one played the Wii U, it was more like a machine gun fire of games for the Switch that already had the hardest part done. Also, unlike any time in history except for the lifespan of the PSP, there are real alternative options for handheld gaming now as we head into this new Switch successor, which probably doesn't affect anyone buying the machine for Pokemon in hell or high water, but it will have an impact on the buyer who just wants to play Hades or Doom in bed or on a road trip and now has that many fewer reasons to buy Nintendo's console over a more open platform.
True, but they still had to develop these games initially for WiiU, only for them to bomb there. And the WiiU was an eighth gen console.
If the rumours of backwards compatibility are to be believed, the Switch 2 could just straight up sell Switch games with Switch 2 enhancement patches. Something very similar was shown to developers with BoTW running at 60fps at 4k on Switch 2, and such a patch is known to exist for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.
It won't have the same newness factor of the WiiU ports, but it will allow Nintendo's evergreen titles to keep that status until the Switch 2 iteration.
You mean the Steam Deck and clones? I don't mean to burst your bubble, but the least janky of these units has you scouring ProtonDB to check a games compatibility with the unit, and community notes on what to enter into the advanced run commands section or on rare occasions, even what Linux commands to run.
And that's the least janky option. The Steam Deck clones are worse, as at least the SD had the good grace to use an operating system designed for that specific hardware and form factor. Yeah. Switch 2 is pretty safe.
You honestly think they're going to put up with any kind of SD/clone jank?
This is exactly my point though. Backwards compatibility is an expectation now, but if you didn't have a Wii U, like most people didn't, it makes the Switch feel like it's got twice as many original games as it actually had, and they won't be able to repeat that.
I've sat just about the most technically unsavvy people I know in front of a Steam Deck and told them to stick to verified games, and it's been as smooth sailing as a Switch is; which is to say that neither is perfect, and the way they're imperfect is a little different between them. But again, PCs have been steadily growing in gaming market share for over a decade. PCs got easier, consoles became more complicated, and maybe some percentage of the market was also willing to learn what they needed to to further close that gap just like how all of our parents eventually learned how to use the internet and cell phones. I'm certainly not capable of measuring the effect of each of those things on that trend, but this is the way we're trending.
The Switch 2 is certainly safe. In particular, the Switch is a device made for children, which helps it reach a demographic that the Steam Deck isn't targeting and may never target. I'm not so sure the next Switch is going to do as well as this one has though. And in each subsequent generation, I think they'll head in the same direction as Microsoft and Sony or do something absolutely insane instead of responding to what the market is actually asking for.
That's the problem. You have to tell people to stick to a currently small selection of possible games on the system to ensure a console-like experience. Or, you can just pick up a Switch 2 and not have to worry about any of that shit.
I'm a Linux gamer, so I know how powerful and impressive Proton is. But a console like experience, it is not. Many of my Steam games need advanced commands just to run acceptably.
Steam Decks hit their real potential in the hands of someone who is not afraid to fuck around.
Verified games are not a small selection anymore. They're not the entire breadth of Steam, but there are about as many verified games as there are Switch games. Double that if you're including the certified playable games. No Switch tax, no compromised version of the game, no subscription to play online. I get a lot more value out of mine than I do a Switch, and the most I've fucked around on it is installing EmuDeck.
True, but Nintendo's consoles already had working FOSS emulators out there they can study. We're still working on the 'working' part when it comes to Xbox OG emulation
The general emulation community is still working on it.
Like I was saying, if they can run retrocompatible games on Xbox Series X, a x86 Windows-like system, then internally Microsoft does have some sort of solution for running OG Xbox and 360 already working.
So it's not a technical issue, public Nintendo emulators don't really change that. Meaning that it's not any more likely that they would offer Nintendo games on PC if they owned them.
It's extremely more likely that they'd put up emulated Nintendo games. We have something bordering on perfect emulation for several of Nintendo's old systems, and we don't have that for Xbox. They can literally just slot in an emulator that someone else coded rather than having to patch in custom emulation code on a per-game basis like they currently do for backwards compatible Xbox games. Again, the point is moot. Microsoft will not own Nintendo, but if anyone else took over Nintendo for any reason, it's much easier to sell fully functioning retro Nintendo games on PC than it is to do the same on PC for old Xbox games.
I'm getting a bit tired of repeating myself. You are responding to a comment that is directed to that particular point.
Microsoft has already figured out how to run older XBox games on PC. As far as the technology goes, XBox One and Series S/X are not compatible with the previous XBoxes, they are PCs in every aspect but branding and closedness. All those games they offer retrocompatibility could be made available on PC. They could put Rare Replay on PC anytime they want. They don't do it because they don't care to do it.
It does not matter that Nintendo emulators are perfect.
They have a working Original Xbox emulator.
They have a working XBox 360 emulator.
They have titles that are entirely owned by them to release, and they only do that on console.
Releasing Nintendo games would be "extremely more likely"? Given that whatever obstacle here is not technical, then the existence of publicly released Nintendo emulators don't change the matter one bit. Meanwhile the licensing complexities only add further obstacles.
You keep making it an axiom of your argument that they just have an emulator ready to go to port all the same games even though the best information we have is that their emulator requires specific tweaks for each game to even get them running on a single hardware target. So you're repeating yourself on an assumption that I don't think is fair to make. That plus their MO is more along the lines of putting out a remaster of Fable or the Master Chief collection on PC for the very few true console exclusives on Xbox. We can agree to disagree and call it here.
It's not uncommon in general emulation to need tweaks for different games, and they already figured those out. If they can get their old games running on Xbox One, One X, Series S and Series X it means they can consistently keep them working across multiple different configurations. At this point, they are perfectly capable of handling a full PC release of these titles if they wanted to. You are getting too caught up in particularities that just don't change the conclusion.
It's not like they'd release a standalone all-purpose emulator. More likely they'd bundle the games with setups that are already tweaked for those particular games. Just as they would need to for Nintendo games. Even Nintendo itself had to do that. The initially flawed Ocarina of Time Switch Online release comes to mind.
It still makes more sense to assume that if Microsoft is not interested in doing it for their own games, there is no reason to assume they would do it for any others.