Nintendo

Nintendo sucks. They're such an anti-consumer company. Every week or so they come out with some new reason to hate them. I'd be lying if I said I didn't get excited when it hit me that I could work my hatred of them into the site with the Art section and an emulation tutorial. Nintendo is so infamous that there's a website dedicated to documenting their bad actions, Sued by Nintendo.

I love and have always loved their games. None of this criticism goes towards their developers, artists, and (most) workers - instead it's aimed at their executives and lawyers. As a kid, Nintendo was all I was into. I watched the directs, bought the newest games, watched lore breakdowns on YouTube, the whole thing. But I just can't support the things they do. I still sometimes play their newest games - via an emulator, when they aren't a Switch 2 exclusive or hard to emulate like Animal Crossing - as one of the view things I still find myself doing for fun, but I will never spend anymore money on them as a company. While I understand the immediate love of their company for the games and worlds they create, more people need to realize the harms they've done and do. My goal with this is to help people to see them for what they truly are: just another money-hungry, soulless, billion-dollar tech corporation, rather than some fun and quirky game dev.

Nintendo is so well known for their legal action and hatred of all things emulators and mods that the meme/internet cryptid "Nintendo Ninjas" were born - ninjas that in some form take action against people who commit the slightest infraction against the company, like emulating their games. The highlights include them taking action against a Costa Rican supermarket, multiple game and mod developers, multiple content creators, simple scans of content they refuse to preserve themselves, and much much more (Sued by Nintendo, Doolan, Reynolds). They've shut down memorials for beloved deceased YouTuber Etika (Good). They sue modders for millions in damages, forever changing their lives (Phillips). They take down fan tournaments who dare to use an online mod for their older titles so everyone can accessibly participate (Brian). They've destroyed countless emulators including Citra for 3DS, Yuzu and Ryujinx for Switch, countless other Switch emulator forks, and, unfruitfully, Dolphin for GameCube and Wii (Williams, Hollister, Fernandez, Dolphin). Despite their attacks on ROMs and game mods, they used an illegally obtained Super Mario Bros. ROM for their Wii Virtual Console, stole art from a fangame for use in Super Nintendo World Japan, and use an emulator at their museum (Bratt, Orland, Edser).

Nintendo frequently makes ridiculous and frustrating choices when it comes to things like game saves and backups (Tassi, Quentin). They constantly enshittify their products in order to tempt you into subscribing to their online fees (Mellon, Peachey). They force you to pay for a subscription to play the online parts of the games you paid for, even for franchises like Splatoon where the main part of the game is their online play. They've made some games available for a limited time only, like Super Mario 3D All-Stars, Jump Rope Hero, and Super Mario Bros. 35. The Switch, Switch Lite, OLED Switch, and Switch 2 Joy-Con controllers have had the problem of control stick drift since the first system launched in 2017, yet they couldn't even be bothered to fix it for the revision (Liszewski). For a long time, they denied that drift was even a real issue (Ivan).

Nintendo restricted monetization of content based around their games under the Creators Program (Doolan). They constantly take down innocent content and channels, like with PointCrow's Breath of the Wild videos or with the channel of an artist who made documentary style videos of Pokémon (Bailey, Hernandez). They frequently take down channels that repost their music online, despite (up until recently, and even then barely) not providing an official way to listen to their music (Wilde). When they did finally decide to make their music available to listen to outside of the games, rather than doing something sensible like posting them on streaming services, they made their own separate app where they can require all users to subscribe to their subscription plan in order to listen to edited versions of tracks that are released in small batches (James-Money).

Thankfully, unlike with some other companies like Google, it is quite easy to not support Nintendo. At worst, it's simple to just not support them monetarily; no one needs their games. But the good news is, despite their best efforts, it's very easy to emulate their games - as I discuss on the site. As of right now, there is no way to emulate Switch 2 games. Anything that claims otherwise is likely lying.