I’m using the word “feel” because I’m not qualified to provide a legal opinion.

It lasting 10 years doesn’t mean much to the people who were sold the game in the last 6 months without any warning they were buying into the final hours.

Should they have announced and removed it as soon as the board meeting ended? How much earlier would that be in this case?

My unsubstantiated theory is the the licences they signed for all the vehicles and real world content had a 10 year lifetime.

Usually those contracts would just require that they stop selling the game, but they may have included something about the servers in the contract too.

Either way they new something was going to change in 2024 and realistically they knew which of these possibilities were viable:

• sign new deals with all licensors and continue business as usual
• sign new deals with cooperative licensors and modify the game to remove the others
• remove the game from sale and keep the servers running for current customers
• remove the game from sale and kill the servers - tell people to buy the sequal

I’d they waited until December of 2023 to have that meeting then that feels negligent.

If they had that meeting earlier and continued to sell the game (until ≈100 days to EOL) without warning customers that feels fraudulent.

Call me crazy but I expect businesses to guarantee their products.

On December 14, 2023, Ubisoft delisted The Crew and its expansions from digital platforms, suspended sales of microtransactions, and announced that the game’s servers would be shut down on March 31, 2024, citing “upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crew_(video_game)

People who paid around us$40 for the game on December 13 were being sold a lemon.

Given that it was released in 2014 it seems likely that their licenses were given a 10 year duration and they always intended to shutdown in 2024 at the latest (of course if its user base failed to reach critical mass they could have pulled the plug earlier).

Does selling a game in 2023 when you plan to kill it in 2024 legally qualify as fraud?

It looks better than the art for the new snow bros game

https://youtu.be/yGsHq-mZI8U

At that point is not really oblivion?!

PSx

Transferable licence.

They can be sold, gifted, inherited, etc.

Its the same concept as a stub game disc which requires a full online install (something Xbox used for cross-gen one/series titles).

Its nothing like the account tied physical sales they proposed at the Xbox one announcement.

Switch 2 game-key cards won’t be account- or console-locked

What? Of course not … that’s why they are in the form of game cards.

I don’t think he has a great understanding of Australian prices.

The current MKW price of au$120 looks high but if you remove our GST and convert to USD with the average exchange rate over the last 12 months its equivalent to us$70.85. (Donky Kong is au$110 or us$65).

We are currently at a low point with our dollar so the conversion for MKW today would be us$66.49. (DK would be us$61).

Compared to the prices I’m seeing internationally it looks like Australia is getting relatively generous prices from Nintendo.

Except Mario Kart has had its fair share of paid post release content lately. We can’t expect it to be the one-off purchase it once was.

As a bundled launch title I expect most launch window sales will be digital. There won’t be 2nd hand game cards on the market in any volume until after they drop the bundle.

If it sells out, expect a price drop in a few years

Switch sold out in 2017, and now the same basic Neon model is selling for the same price in 2025.

In Australia we had an au$90 price tier with only 6 titles:

• Breath of the Wild
• Pokkén Tournament DX
• Fire Emblem Warriors
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2
• Super Smash Bros Ultimate
• Tears of the Kingdom

All their other AAA titles were au$80, for example:

• Super Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons
• Super Mario Odyssey
• Pokémon Sword/Shield or Scarlet/Violet
• Super Mario Party / Superstars / Jamboree
• New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe / Super Mario Wonder

Then smaller releases were placed at $70, for example:

• 1-2-Switch
• Go Vacation
• Fitness Boxing 2/ 3
• Miitopia
• WarioWare: Get It Together / Move it

You can see they used the $90 tier quite aggressively early in the piece and then scaled back significantly with almost 5 years between Smash Bros and Tears of the Kingdom.

At the same time they made sure the Marios (Kart, 3d, 2d, Party, Sports), Pokemons and other franchises with broad all-ages appeal were priced in the middle at $80.

To be honest I’m a bit worried about the pricing for Super Mario Kart World, the previous one was the beat selling Switch title and if they come out of the gate with high sales they may take the wrong lessons and try to lock in that au$120 price (a 50% increase!).

On the other hand they may just be price anchoring with the bundle. Having the standalone console priced at au$700 and the bundle at au$770 will let the consumer find ways to justify the purchase, they might say the console is worth $700 so the game is only $70, or they might argue the game is $120 so the console is really only $650. Either way will make them feel better about giving Nintendo the money.

I suppose the best outcome for the consumer would be for most people to get SMKW in the bundle and then hopefully the next title they release at that price point has lacklustre sales. If they see they sell more units at a lower price it can be a good outcome for everyone.

I don‘t see 90% discounts in the Nintendo shop

Not 1st party sure, but there is a weekly deal cycle where 3rd party publishers compete to stand out.

https://www.dekudeals.com/games?filter%5Bcritic_score%5D=70&filter%5Bplatform%5D=switch&filter%5Bformat%5D=digital&filter%5Bdiscount%5D=discounted

These are the top 5 sellers on Switch:

• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons
• Super Smash Bros Ultimate
• The legend of Zelda:Breath of the Wild
• Super Mario Odyssey

These links take you to a price tracker with a chart showing historical prices. The RRP of each of these has been static, and discounts are short and infrequent.

In a break from form Nintendo hasn’t released a budget “Selects” label for older titles this generation.

Their emulators have always been proprietary. The waters were a little muddied by the NES/SNES Classic consoles using a Linux OS but the emulators were their own code.

Their FOSS code is made available when required and is published here:

https://support.nintendo.com/jp/oss/index.html

Interesting to see reasons for where compatibility is physically impossible:

1. The console is a different shape and can’t fit the LABO frames
2. The Joy-Con 2 are a different shape and can’t fit the Ring-Con or Leg Strap.
3. The Jon-Con 2 don’t have the IR Motion Camera
4. The Jon-Con 2 rumble is weaker than Joy Con