Buff Mokey Mouse - oh Nintendo...

You know one thing that’s always stumped me? How Nintendo’s reputation on the Internet has been in constant flux. See, you look at Nintendo, and you compare them to other big AAA publishers like EA and Activision, and they don’t seem that bad. They don’t rush a game out to boost Christmas or Fiscal Year earnings, they don’t go out of their way to censor or deny activism for basic human rights, they don’t bend the knee to China or shove any microtransactions into full-priced games. Just recently Activision has come under fire for shuttering both Vicarious Visions and Toys for Bob. EA has been through many a controversy for trying to nickel and dime their consumers. In the grand scheme of things: Nintendo does only one thing and one thing only: they piss their fans off.

And in a way, they have amassed a hate base that so loud and so overbearing, that to an outsider, they may honestly seem worse than EA or Activision Blizzard. Who’s to say pricing an HD port of a Wii game at $60 is just as bad as shoveling loot boxes or microtransactions into a full price game? Is it better? Worse? The lesser of two evils?

Also, "Nintendo fans" seem spiteful, passive-agressive and everything because there are so many of them. They're not one big hivemind, they're different people with different opinions, because the games attract so many different people. Hell, half the time you're just seeing loud minorities who know how to make their voice heard. The majority of Nintendo fans don't post about it on the Internet.