Over the years, there have been plenty of ad campaigns in the gaming industry that directly take shots at the competition. The Sega Genesis based a lot of its early identity on being a snarky counterpoint to Nintendo, with ads openly calling out Mario, while PlayStation released commercials poking fun at how game sharing worked on the Xbox One. These jabs contributed heavily to the console wars that defined much of the broader gaming culture of the 90s and early 2000s.
One company that has typically been above that kind of approach has been Nintendo. The company typically ignores the blows from other game developers, focusing instead on their own products and the strength of their games. However, a former Nintendo executive’s recent comments about how the company’s high standards impact pricing also serve as the ultimate backhanded insult to a very modern element of game design.
During a lecture that former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé gave at the NY Game Center, Fils-Aimé was asked about Nintendo’s lack of promotional sales on first-party titles. It’s only a few times a year that Nintendo lowers the price of those exclusive games, especially when compared to the far more frequent (and extreme) sales you’ll find in the digital marketplaces for Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. According to Fils-Aimé, that’s because “The Nintendo mentality is, we’re shipping a game complete.” Fils-Aimé described it as a unique mentality at Nintendo, which avoids “day one updates” and other patches that many modern games rely on to isolate and fix bugs.
This is why the developer feels they can still charge full price for older games. As an example, Fils-Aimé pointed to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which has been available for a decade but is still priced at $60. On the surface, the comment does come across as a source of pride for Nintendo instead of being any specific slight against any particular target. Fils-Aimé is also not currently employed by Nintendo, making this less of a full frontal attack by the company and more of a blunt observation. However, the implications of the comment from Fils-Aimé also speak to a major difference between the way Nintendo develops games and how other companies go about it, with the difference highlighting how Nintendo approaches games in a way that the rest of the industry can’t quite match.
Nintendo’s commitment to delivering complete games may stem more from personal commitment to craftmanship than any attempt to show up the competition, but the comments from Fils-Aimé still highlight how the company sees itself compared to other studios. In modern gaming, it’s not uncommon for games to launch with necessary patches to download. Sometimes it’s removing bugs from the game or fixing broken features, other timees its calbirating the meta or tweaking the gameplay. Nintendo doesn’t typically have to do that. Even if there are eventually updates, they only come after the fact and almost never with the inital release.
Instead, they seemingly approach game design with a perfectionist mentality that means a game in need of patches is simply an incomplete game. By this logic, Nintendo doesn’t see many rival game releases as a complete product. Instead, any game released with a necessary patch upon release is being released unfinished. This is why, from their perspective, it’s okay to sell those games at a reduced rate down the line. The Nintendo exclusive titles, the ones that the developer painstakingly crafted to their full potential, are almost always going to remain at their more firm price tag as a result of that level of craft. It’s a sly comment from Fils-Aimé, but one that highlights how seriously Nintendo takes its game development — and how that separates them from other developers.
This isn’t to decry game developers who decide to patch their games. Sometimes it’s to remove harmful or offensive material, other times it is to add quality-of-life tweaks that make the game run smoother. It’s not necessarily a curse on a game if it requires some patching after launch, and it can even be promising to see developers adjusting their games to the players. However, there is something to be said for a game that can just work perfectly fine as soon as it is installed — for lack of a better term, a “complete game.”
Even if the underlying game may have problems or flaws, Nintendo-developed titles never necessarily feel incomplete. It’s an ethos that separates Nintendo from other developers, a point of pride that can also be seen as a sly slight against the competition. If Nintendo only releases complete games that don’t require patches on day one, what does that say about how Nintendo sees other games? Given Nintendo’s tendency to avoid directly calling out the competition, it does stand out when a former leading figure at the company highlights what separates Nintendo from other developers.
