They've been shutting down Smash Bros tournaments as well.

I never understood why they abandoned Splatoon 2. Like, I get that they have a new game, and that's great, I guess.....but why not support Splatoon 2 until Switch 2 comes out? I never bought the splatoon 3, because I JUST bought splatoon 2 like 2-3 years prior when it came out. You NEED online to play that game.

So you're paying $59.99 for the game, and then $20 a year for online. All for a game that exists in a time bubble. Once it's time for the next game, fuck you. Buy the new game. Your old game means nothing.

Well fuck you too Nintendo. I'll just not buy Splatoon 3, and not pay for online anymore. How about that?

Never got into Splatoon but it looked like great fun and kind of perfect for low-stakes competition.

Fucks sake Nintendo

As one of the leaders in said community for the NA scene I wouldn't lay the blame entirely on Splat3. Things were slowing down before then and a lot of the old guard were hanging up their hats.

Networking left much to be desired, but we also started the grassroots on the Wii U after all.

that promised a bunch of network functionality improvements that never materialized.

Holy fuck, why do the multi-billion dollar companies need to wait until their 3rd game to have decent netcode?

Edit: And apparently even that wasn't enough, because it "never materialized."

I owned Mario Kart 8 for Wii U and it had a feature to record gameplay and post it to YouTube.

I post a clip once and they fucking claimed ad revenue on it.

That's not entirely true, you could keep the videos up if all the ad revenue went to Nintendo. In other words, if you paid them so you could promote their game.

I stopped playing Mario Kart online with others on the Wii. Some players had set an infinite blue shells hack on. Just wasn't fun to play. Complained to Nintendo and they replied like there was nothing they could do or something like that.

Nintendo is competent at exactly 1 thing - designing great video games.

They are run by the equivalent of dwarven master blacksmiths... They're one of the few gaming companies with employees on staff with more than 40 years experience of game dev (and whom have ONLY ever worked at Nintendo their entire careers) in charge of things.

That's great if you like Zelda and Mario games... but because they're run by a bunch of old-school grandpas... they're not good at much else.

Terrible store, multiplayer, ancillary modern network-driven services like voice chat and partying up, little to no 3rd-party support (whether it's games, media apps, or even tech integrations with formats like Dolby ATMOS), and - as a benefit - really terrible device security so it's usually pretty easy for folks to reverse engineer, run custom boot-loaders / jailbreak / scrape their store servers / etc. - stuff that companies like Sony and Microsoft either never had issues with - or have taken seriously long enough that they have locked down.

The only reason they're still in business is that they still do the one thing that matters most the best - design really great game-play mechanics for IP that is beloved by multiple generations of gamers who will overlook everything else.

IMO SD cards are not good for gaming and accessible M.2 should be more common

Just mild correction, the Dreamcast came with the dialup modem. So while it wasnt as good, it had functional internet for 99 out of the box