This is not a deeply researched industry insider article. This is not even a reasearched undergrad thesis for a collge media literacy class, or anything like that. This is just the somewhat thought out diatribe of a forty-something man in New England who has lived through much of the roots of the pop culture which is practically worshipped today, when these very same hobbies and the stories in them made me a "nerd" and a social outcast. The after the fact validation feels pretty good, but that's not what I'm here for.

I'm here to offer a frank series of thoughts about where I see gaming headed. Mostly this will include complaining about Nintendo, especially the frivolous and dangerous patent suits filed by them, some of which have actually passed at time of writing this. If later in pop history this goes down as some kind of Neumeier-level quote of uncanny foresight, that's for later. I just want to vent regardless. I'll start making my points first, and leave why I think they should be listened to at the end.

At time of writing Nintendo has been fighting PocketPal studios under the guise of patent law, to prevent them from running where Nintendo has walked. PocketPal studios developed the game PalWorld for PC and other platforms, where it is found is not relevant. What is relevant is it features varied creatures not unlike Nintendo's most famous media juggernaut licensing cash cow. Some critics of PalWorld accuse them of outright "ripping them off", and infact, that "copyright infringement" was Ninty's first attempt to destroy them.
I can see some of the cause for these complaints. So many of these characters are so reminescent of their more famous counterparts they could be mistaken for fan characters ( and in the internet circles I travel I have seen many video game fan characters). The game feels rather middling to me, it feels like someone's April Fools' Day joke brought to life, but I believe it deserves to exist. Unfortunately, however, Nintendo seems intent on starting with them to make PocketPal the first case for being allowed to poison the hay for anyone who could attempt to make anything which could take food from any of their prized cash cows, even long after they eventually get chopped up into someone's leftovers like StarFox or Dillon (havent heard of him? Look at the 3DS game library and scratch your head about that later).

The next elephant (with armor that makes Hannibal's march through the Alps look like an amateur act) is Digimon Story Time Stranger. This franchise - a spinoff of Tamagochi which was active long before Pikachu was even a spark in Satoshi Tajiri's head - has had the gall to make a game in it's franchise where a player can climb aboard one of their virtual creatures as a mount (which PalWorld also allows; you can scamper through the fields on a frost elemental ferret, if memory serves), and now at date of writing, Nintendo has filed and won a patent case for riding living creature-based non-player characters on land or air. Nevermind the fact that horses existed in history and were used widely in the famous Red Dead franchise, as well as a forgotten video game western flatly titled Gun, and let's not forget Agro, Wander's loyal steed in Sony's auteur work Shadow Of The Colossus, AND it's followup The Last Guardian with it's dumb flying puppy (I say with loving teasing; Trico is adorable).

I don't recall Nintendo suing against Rockstar for Red Dead Redemption, nor Sony for Agro in Shadow Of Colossus, or barring Konami from launching the NES game of The Lone Ranger (yes, that exists). They didn't complain when SquareSoft in it's heyday put flightless birds in the game to carry their angsty Final Fantasy cast into glory, even when they defected to Sony in 1996. It seems oddly timely that they only care about being able to have a living creature carry you into battle when the creature resembles a ferret but is blue instead of brown, or is a dinosaur, some 30 years after Yoshi protected Mario twice in his lifetime. No this only happened when riding an ice ferret or a yellow fox looked better than Scarlet or Violet's motorcycle lizards.

this falls under the categoryof selective patent enforcement, so my friends say. Neither of us are lawyers, but I have a few friends in tech industry (yes, I am a "furry" and nerds like us have been vital in technical fields since the 1970s), and violation of anti-trust laws in the United States, a blatant attempt to use the law to tie the hands of competitors.

Not the first time in history either. That same friend reminded me that Apple Computers sued Samsung corporation over the shape of the now-ubiquitous smart phones, to stop their products from interfereing with their iPhone empire. Both survive today, because Samsung agreed to pay Apple for the license to the design.

Larger studios could pay such outrageous fees to Nintendo similarly, which is great if you only like games from the large developers. The same large developers who are building annual sports franchises that charge full price year after year for iterative game tweaks and roster updates which could easily be patches or DLC respectively, instead of rebuilding year after year until the used game market is flooded with hundreds of used copies of the game from two years ago, now bought and sold for 1/10 the value (and I spent two years working at a used game store I shall not name, I have personally seen the angry customers being paid $5 for a game they spent $50 on a year ago, so we can sell it for $8 and this is hardly an exaggeration).

My favorite games though? They don't necessarily never come from the big names. I have bought nearly every Final Fantasy mainline game near lanuch, I am as enthusiastic about a new Zelda title as the next gamer, maybe more, and I pounced immediately on every modern Fire Emblem and Paper Mario installment. Metroid, Mario all of them.

The games I stick to the most though? They tend to be the more esoteric experiences. This includes indie darling staples like Shovel Knight and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and yes, PalWorld ( which is middling execution on a fever dream idea I wasn't sure should ever exist but am amused it does). This also extends to the deeper reaches of Steam lately, and small titles even made by one person plus a few contributing artists for flavor. Chained Echoes for one, and other bonkers stuff virtually no one would have heard of, like Elohim Eternal (a bizarre game that looks like it's made in RPG Maker, but has the lofty and maybe pretentious writing of a Xenosaga game, complete with sci-fi retelling of bible lore), or the cyberpunk indie Memoirs of a Battle Brothel (which is not always as raunchy as it sounds, nor as the store page looks; there's some truly clever Firefly-like subversive fiction writing present).

Where is Matthias Linda of Chained Echoes, or George Alexandros of Elohim Eternal supposed to get the cash to support the claim if SquEnix decides they invented turn-based robot armors (they did not, TecnoSoft could boast that with Herzog Zwei, but I digress), or Nintendo patents button cues for extra damage or defense in RPGs, to undercut competitor's profit margins, or make them useless?

There is clear and present danger when a company abuses the law or finance to remove competition. We knew this in the 1920s with FDR's New Deal, which also included the Trust Buster acts that form Anti-trust laws which are supposed to prevent these things. There have been numerous cases in history, not just in entertainment, but all across industrial history. I'll stick to a pop culture touchstone for my example, but both childhood staples of my toy-buying life, Kay-Bee Toy Stores and Toys 'R Us were bought by the same retail management firm to later be foreclosed on. Now the only place to buy your toys is a barely existant shelf space in Target or God forbid Wal-mart, and Lego's stores and direct-to-market approach puts the cost of their licensing fees directly on to the hobbyists who just want a blocky Ornithopter from Dune to sit on a shelf.

As I said, I will explain who I am and why you should listen to me now. I'm just a forty-something nerd who grew up rather sheltered in New England, with a memory so clear I can recite entire films chapter-and-verse with very little warmup (I might actually record my one-man shows someday as proof).

I am not a political analyst, nor an investment broker, nor even a college accredited historian with a salary the length of my arm for information that's 75% accurate (my English professor cited Alanis Morissette for a defintion of irony in my Lit 101, the hack). When you spend as much time as I did watching the world, you begin to see what you should be looking for in the things you see. When you spend as many hours as I have reading, you really learn to read between the lines.

I have spent many years on Earth soaking in pop culture, and during the last 20 have seen all my childhood institutions die or become villains (Electronic Arts was an underground indie before it became the evil sports empire of EA Games). Nintendo is doing what in TV wrestling is called a face-heel turn, a good guy becoming a bad guy. Hulk Hogan did it, Sgt. Slaughter did it, and Nintendo is now coming hard off the turnbuckle whacking anyone with a monster that fits in a tool you carry in your pocket with a folding chair.

What you do about it is up to you. Frankly it's utterly disgraceful that despite the enormous fun and innovation of the Nintendo Switch and it's game, when the long-awaited Switch 2 was announced, the price of it's games, the poor launch practices, the Game Key Cards instead of actual viable physical game releases, and eventually the fact that the most famous games that would be impossible to play on a Switch original, the biggest case for an improved Switch 2, cannot even port comfortably to the new expensive juggernaut without compromise (Cyberpunk 2077 was a mess at first anyway, but it's had years to be made right, and on Switch 2 it is broken all over again). The entire gaming industry has wished for the Nintendo Switch 2 for the better part of 3 years with bated breath, and the wish was granted on a Monkey Paw, with devastating consequences, and it STILL OUTSOLD the original at launch by a staggering amount.

I will not buy an Switch 2, or in fact by anything more in the present day Nintendo ecosystem, until Nintendo has been free of horrible decisions like this for a good long while, and I do not believe this will happen under current management. I have heard fellow longtime game fans say this never would have happened during Satoru Iwata's day, and now that he's gone, Shuntaro Furukawa's "the development leader's way of thinking", is steering all that clout the Switch 1 earned over the last 8 years into a spiral of heavy-handed manipultive practices that have earned the company my disapproval, for what little that matters.

I know I'm only one man, and even if I got all my friends and found-family in gaming to turn their backs on Switch 2, it would not even cause a rounding error in the company's profit margins, but take this information as you will. If you have read this in it's entirety, I congratulate and thank you, provided you take this to heart and encourage others to follow suit. Maybe enough of us can stop the flow of cash to these bad actors to make them blink and turn back within our lifetime.