For a company that has been so successful, it is always amusing to see Nintendo’s core incompetence and the way it constantly take a dump on its best customers and biggest fans. As someone who is not a Nintendo fan, the company often seems like one of those rock bands that’s touring 30 years where the only original member is one of the roadies.
So in 2015, Nintendo actually released a game that made me thinking for half a second about buying the steaming pile that is the Wii U (followed by a chuckle before I returned to pondering who would win in a fight between Deadpool and Batman). That game was Super Mario Maker, which was a fairly decent idea and (apparently) implementation for Nintendo.
Here’s the weird thing–apparently Nintendo planned all along to delete stages that weren’t popular. When the game launched, Nintendo warned that,
Please be aware that after a fixed period of time, courses with low popularity will be automatically deleted from the server.
What the hell? Why would Nintendo ever do this prior to the end-of-life of the game? This is insanity for a game that itself is just a game creation tool. But that level of stupidity wasn’t enough for Nintendo. Oh, no, not even close.
When they delete a level, apparently they set a permanent flag on the local copy of the level which makes it impossible to ever re-upload the level. So say your level gets removed by Nintendo, you go in and make some changes to make it playable, and then decided to reupload it.
Sorry, sucka. Nintendo ain’t got time for that.
But wait, there’s more. Nintendo apparently took the geniuses who came up with its “Let’s Play” policy of screwing over fans to also go after folks who were a bit too creative with their levels.
Kotaku recounts the story of a Super Mario Maker player who named a level as a homage to “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” and called the level “Honey, I Shroomed The Mario.”
. . . someone reported my level and Nintendo deleted it. My shorthand for mushroom to reference an old movie was deemed “related to criminal activity.”
Buying a Nintendo product isn’t an entree into video gaming, but rather the first step in starting an abusive relationship.