#djsonic94

I feel like reaction to Yooka-Laylee was mixed enough that Playtonic still has a chance for redemption. It’s not like Mighty No. 9 where you had this violent “WHAT IS THIS GARBAGE” reaction. There are a number of people out there who claim to have enjoyed YL a great deal. Playtonic can definitely bounce back from YL’s shortcomings.

It sounds like the major overhaul patch really helped, too. It made the camera smarter, and tweaked tons and tons of things people had problems with (including that log boss GiantBomb was stumped by). I wouldn’t mind giving it a shot one day, once it’s discounted enough. I played through all of Banjo-Kazooie a couple months ago (full 100% completion and all) so I feel like I’d be in a pretty good position to discern what’s up with Yooka-Laylee.

Nintendo likes to make money. Even before they got in to the video game market, Nintendo was always about low production budgets and high profits. And when I say that, like, all companies are technically about low budgets/high profits, but Nintendo aims for the extreme end of both spectrums.

I’ve mentioned it before, about the story Jeremy Parish told about Gunpey Yokoi and a race car toy Nintendo created: instead of making a remote controled race car that could turn left or right, they made one that could only turn left. They saved money by having a cheaper turning mechanism, and as a result could sell the toy at a lower price, and in turn reaped massive profits far in excess of their competition.

Nintendo has always looked for esoteric ways to get big, easy money like that.

Undoubtedly, Nintendo saw the literal billions of dollars passing through Youtube every month and somebody at the company said “Nobody can stop us from enforcing legal ownership of this content and we’ll make a lot of easy money.”

I doubt there was even any hesitation. That dude probably got promoted to be the head of whatever department he was working in. With a single email suddenly Nintendo’s pockets are being filled with hundreds of thousands, if not multiple millions of dollars every month because they’re claiming ownership of video content they personally did not spend any resources creating.

I can see things from Nintendo’s perspective. A lot of money is changing hands while their products are in the background. It’s like owning a famous location that often gets used as a movie set. Places like that charge fees to let you film there. Nintendo’s doing the same thing with their games.

It’s also an emerging market. Nintendo wants to set a standard now while they still can.

I understand where they’re coming from. But that’s from the perspective of a corporation who has the goal of making money. From the perspective of somebody who either produces videos or watches videos, it’s stubborn, shrewd, and harmful. Nothing about their policy is helpful to anyone but Nintendo. People do the work of spreading information, generating buzz and marketing Nintendo’s games for them, and not only does Nintendo get money from product sales, they also now get paid just for trying to sell us something. They don’t even have to put anything in our hands, they just have to say something that’s buzz worthy and watch Youtube wheel in truck loads of other people’s cash. To a guy like Reggie Fils-Aimé, I’m sure that’s just about as close to literal, actual heaven as it gets for him.

What about for everyone else? Well, now people who run Youtube channels are skittish about Nintendo products. No matter which way they turn, they’re getting a raw deal. Either Nintendo gets most of their revenue, or all of their revenue. It’s like paying the Mafia for protection – you’re paying a protection fee to be protected from the guys you’re paying. Give Nintendo 40% of your adshare or they’ll smash all your stuff.

So the solution is to do less videos on Nintendo products. There’s no money to be made there. Less videos on Nintendo products means less free marketing for Nintendo. Less marketing means less consumer awareness. Less consumer awareness means in the long run Nintendo has to work harder than their competitors, because they’re losing ground on Youtube word-of-mouth. So, in a round-about way, is that really worth it? Only Nintendo can answer that question, but it’s definitely not making them look very friendly to a community that wants to support them but is actually just being antagonized.

I mean, I kind of have a whole video about this. I think there’s too much conflation between the work of fans and the work of bootleggers. There’s a long history of cheap, poorly games created and sold by pirates. 7 Grand Dad, Sonic Jam 6, Super King Kong 99, etc. Those are legitimately harmful bootleg games created (or in some cases, hacked together) to steal money, basically.

Nintendo in particular has always been hugely invested in stopping piracy. As of this writing, there’s a post going around my Tumblr dash of Nintendo banning entire 3DS systems from accessing the Internet on the firmware level if they have homebrew installed. If you connect your 3DS to the internet while homebrew is installed, it will permanently disable all WiFi functionality on that system. That’s not just blocking you from using the eShop, it’s street pass, everything. You can’t turn WiFi on. The button won’t work anymore, or ever again. It doesn’t matter if what you were doing was harmless or not. That’s the kind of serious Nintendo is about piracy. Always has been.

And its these kind of “all or nothing” rules that Nintendo applies to fan games. You may not be pirates, people at Nintendo know you aren’t pirates, but they have to set an example and they’re going to do so with extreme prejudice.

In my video I outline ways to maybe avoid stepping on Nintendo’s toes, and I do think that will help you fly under the radar to an extent. The problem is its literally impossible to follow my rules. If you want to distribute your game, every place (Mediafire, etc.) available to host it runs advertising to pay for server costs. Nobody is allowed to profit from Nintendo’s stuff but Nintendo. Downloading a fan game drives ad revenue to that file host.

Even hosting the file yourself, on your own web server, probably won’t work because you have to pay somebody for that. Even if the server is a physical PC in your basement, you still have to pay the phone company. It’s hard to know where the boundaries are, and I think Nintendo would be happy if the takeaway was “stop, don’t start.”

I don’t think linearity has to be a four-letter word. I think more and more people are realizing that there are all kinds of games, and that the whole industry doesn’t necessarily all have to move towards one style of game. I’ve talked before about how I like Errant Signal’s Sonic video, where he likens Sonic Unleashed to a rhythm game like Guitar Hero because it’s about execution accuracy. You’re giving a performance.

That can be fun, and has been proven to be fun outside of strictly being a Sonic game (and the fact I have to qualify it like that at all is kind of messed up, as if Sonic automatically taints everything he’s involved with).

Honestly, I think Sonic Utopia was on to something. I was a little bewildered by it at first, but the more I played it, the more I took my time to poke around, the more I enjoyed how big its level was.

It may be a little too wide at the start, but does gradually narrow down to an ending point. I believe those that are working on Sonic Utopia have said other levels won’t be quite this wide-open.

I don’t know if I am the best person to ask about this because I am in a very precarious and delicate situation that is not really definable as a “successful career.”

In high school I’d get the old “where do you see yourself in ten years?” question and I honestly had no idea. I knew I liked to make games, I knew I liked to do artwork, I knew I had an interest in writing, but there was no forward path on any of that stuff where I’d make any money from it, and combined with all of the other emotional problems I was suffering with at the time (and to some degree still suffer from), I just kind of… stalled out.

If they work, they work. When there were rumors going around about Shovel Knight making an appearance, it was a weird, cool thing that I was pretty excited to see happen. It didn’t happen, of course, but I think it would’ve worked just fine.

But they’d have to have a lot of weight behind them. I mean no offense, because I’m an indie developer myself (who is definitely more of a nobody than the examples you gave) but in some ways indie games feel a bit like the kids table of game development, you know?

And that’s part of what being an indie is, you know? You don’t always have professional-grade resources to work with, so you make do with what you can. You emulate eras that inspire you, you keep your scopes small, and your budgets smaller. I can see how a company like Nintendo might view that negatively, even if they open their platforms up to publish those sorts of games.