Fan artists stay winning.
the year is 2030. you google search “mario”. gemini ai pops up at the top of the search, informing you that you have just broken Nintendo Law 248, attempting to generate an ai output regarding a Nintendo intellectual property. the SWAT team is en route.
I’m surprised Nintendo has suffered gen AI as long as they have. They don’t want people thinking about Nintendo IP for free, I can’t imagine they’re happy about every single Nintendo art asset being shoved into AI models for nothing.
Nintendo is quite clearly transitioning towards being a “Disney-style” media company.
They sell Mario, the character, not a Mario game. They want licensed plushies, water bottles, clock faces, theme parks, movies. And yes, a few games, so long as they have the characters in the safest most streamlined way possible.
Generative AI is profoundly dangerous to this type of company. ChatGPT won’t generate Super Mario 64 part 2 for you… But it can generate infinite amounts of shirts, mugs, funny videos, paintings, etc.
Transitioning? Nintendo has been Disney-but-videogames-instead-of-movies for decades.
I’ve always felt mario was the mickey mouse of nintendo; a character nearly entirely devoid of personality that exists to be the face of a brand.
the only version of Mario with an interesting personality is paper mario, and only because there are occasionally funny dialogue choices where mario is mean or implied to be sarcastic
I get what you’re saying, but that’s really not reflective of Nintendo as a business. Their hardware is still their dominant revenue driver, and their increased profitability in recent years has largely been the result of their pricing discipline on their software products. Revenues from their merchandise and other licensed products has always been a bare fraction of their business. They are fundamentally a video game hardware/software company.
Which is why them acting like Disney re: their trademarks and fan-media is so baffling. Their business is making software and hardware so that they can sell more software and hardware. Their draconian approach to IP enforcement and general anti-consumer behavior feels like a holdover from the pre-internet era, and/or reflective of idiosyncrasies of Japanese business culture (no idea if that’s a thing, just speculating). They’re keeping a tight leash on their IP, but they’re also not getting most of the benefits of an active fan community.
Nintendo is a weird company. Consistently very successful, so I can only justify so much armchair quarterbacking, but their attitude about IP enforcement seems tangential to that success.
What is definitely happening is that Nintendo is enshittifying itself. They’re barely holding the line on the quality of their first-party titles while charging more and offering less. They’re lucky the rest of their industry is going down the drain even faster or they’d be in big trouble. With the success of the Switch 2 (so far) I’m guessing they’ll get even more complacent and greedy, which will probably lead them to fumbling the bag in the next couple of years. It’ll be interesting if they do end up going the Disney route and watering down their brand equity with too much licensed garbage and media. So far they don’t seem to be tipping too far in that direction, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it happened.
Nintendo has always gone through waves of litigiousness and backing down. Hell if I know what drives it.
It’s not even waves, it’s a constant and often proactive effort. Every time there’s a new way to engage with media, there are one or more Nintendo lawsuits about it. Even when they back down, it’s because either the offending activity is established as being expressly legal, or they figure out how to control and/or monetize it.
I understand their intent, which is the same as any other big business, but it feels like a lot of effort for a questionable result. I don’t think their aggressive legal strategy is what differentiates them from their competition, but who knows? They keep doing it and they keep making money, so maybe it works.
let them fightWhoever wins, we lose
Reminds me of Epic v. Google over allowing alternative app stores that weirdly enough put F-Droid and the likes into danger. This too can lead to unforseen consequencies for everyone excluding megacorps. Almost feels like you are a NPC watching super-persons plowing through half the city to settle some little grudges between them.
Yea, nothing to do but hope the least bad option wins out
But then the monkey paw curls…
Alien vs. Predator
Marxism-Leninism-Boivinism-Muscleism-Maddenism-Starism reigns supreme, again
I don’t like the idea of corporations getting more power
But in this circumstance, it seems like that’s going to happen either way so I hope the courtroom has a gas leak that explodes and unleashes some sort of ancient powerbeast that destroys every corporation
The American Tech CEO fears Luigi
Nintendo’s legal department being used for the societal good one (1) time sounds about right
I hope they both kill each other
Bring back dueling
Nintendo has been vocal about being anti-ai before. It’s about the only good take they’ve had lately.
Plot twist, this image is AI generated /s
The manga and anime industry is actualy important and they are firmly against it. I don’t think Nintendo makes any difference at all in the current stage, maybe in the future. AI fan works are vastly unappealing and several Japanese fan sites already segregated AI works. Making purely AI slop gets view but very little real engagement and sales.
The real problem is China is arguably already the biggest anime related consumer and Mihoyo(the biggest CN anime games maker) is already incorporating AI sadly. Its frustrating because I had a lot of hope for them(Genshin anime etc), but now I see a future China will gladly use AI slop and continue to destroy JP influence. On the other hand CN gets nothing in the long term from this, instead of creating a real manga/anime industry, if they go the AI slop route it will just crash and burn when people worldwide push back against AI. Not like they care, nationalism and all.
