While 2017 will, no doubt, be something Nintendo will remember, it also has a few blemishes that taint a strong debut of the Switch. For most people, this company is very, very bad when it comes to understanding the Internet. In recent years, they have ordered cease and desists on a number of fan projects. They have gone after emulation and ordered websites to get rid of ROMs of their games. Just recently, they have updated a part of their Creators Program.
For the last few years, Nintendo has partnered up with YouTube for monetization. Despite existing, it has been met with quite a bit of scrutiny. From games that are whitelisted to every video needing to be reviewed for their approval, it's clear they don't understand online. With the banning of live streaming on YouTube, it's another sign that they are not in the right century. No way in hell are users going to create another account just to stream games. I get what they're doing, but this squeaky clean image they are trying to show is not always going to work. This isn't 1985 where the audience is mostly 10 year olds. It also shows just how incompetent these idiot executives in Japan are.
Japan has mostly been a very strict area for companies. Sega's Japan branch did not care for Tom Kalinske and his approach with the Genesis. While they did approve a few of his suggestions, the tensions between the Japan and America offices got to the point of the company being in the red and struggling in the second half of the 90s. Nintendo is in that realm, only with billions of money. How the Switch does in its second year next March will tell if they succeed or struggle. I really think Japan has the final say on everything and the presidents of the American and European divisions can't do anything about it. If they defied something, the odds of them being fired would be very high.
I get the emulation thing. A number of their titles are on Virtual Console and they want customers (or repeat idiots who will buy them for a fifth or sixth time) to play them legitimately. Here's the thing, though. There is no way they can go after every site that carries ROMs and ISOs. Not to mention the Virtual Console ports are the exact same games with nothing additional added to them. This is a gray area and Nintendo is trying to do whatever it takes to get money.
Much like the emulation, I get what Nintendo is doing with the fan projects. It is their own IPs. They are, unfortunately, within their rights to have them removed. Once again, here's the thing. There are lots of fan projects that get no cease and desists. Sonic 3 Complete is something I doubt Sega cares. Hell, even Tecmo doesn't shut down any of the Tecmo Super Bowl hacks people make, adding updated rosters for the NES hit. NHL 94 even gets updates with modern rosters, and that has one of the biggest followings for anything that doesn't involve RPGs and platformers. It seems like Nintendo is the only one that tries to do anything most of the time.
One of these days, these executives need to realize how loved the IPs and franchises are on social media. This isn't the 80s and 90s where you have one to three others together playing an NES or Nintendo 64 game. Nintendo has to understand how useful the Internet is and realize it's not a bad thing. Not everything is G-rated, and they have to suck it up and realize that. If they don't, they will get way more hate than they would ever think down the road.
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