Sleeper, Breakout, and Bust for Nintendo Direct 9.13.2018

Nintendo’s latest Direct presentation was packed full of information, announcements, and details. Plenty will be written about and focused on the big announcement of a new Animal Crossing so let's focus in on three standouts for different reasons from the latest Nintendo Direct. As per usual a sleeper is something that showed promise but is getting very limited if any at all, traction amongst the community. It’s something people may have seen and said, “Hmm, that looks neat” but moved on. A breakout in this context is fairly similar to a sleeper in definition but it is being talked about or hyped up in some form or fashion or has some fanbase or juice behind it and it will at least meet if not exceed expectations. The bust isn’t automatically the worst thing showed or the thing with the smallest buzz, but instead indicates something that you may buy in on and is just not going to come together and deliver.

Sleeper:

This was by far the hardest to find from this Direct. Not because there wasn’t anything interesting, but because so many things were stuffed into this Direct and only probably 2 or 3 are the “big” bombshell news stories it left a lot of room for potential sleeper titles. In the end, I decided to go with Diablo 3 as the sleeper. This may seem counterintuitive as a major game from a major developer which has already seen a ton of success, but I believe this could really sell a ton of copies as it is in the sweet spot of being old enough that people want to pick it up and play again or the folks that passed it over initially now have a new avenue to buy it. Also being able to take this game on the go is a perfect fit and still really novel. When Diablo 3 first launched could you imagine playing it in HD on a portable system on a plane or in between classes at college?

Breakout:

The breakout from this Direct was a strange surprise, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the potential of tabletop gaming on the Switch. It is such a brilliant and obvious idea, I think I even heard some suggestions of this early in the Switch lifecycle and it just makes the most sense. Instead of dragging around multiple boards and pieces and possibly losing small, easy to lose pieces or cards, just being able to carry around one Switch and play tabletop games is really going to bring new people to the system. I don’t

partake in this scene very much but I have heard of Settlers of Catan and Pandemic, and if this is reasonably priced and grows out a list of popular beloved tabletop games it really could be a boon for Nintendo.

Bust:

There is a clear bust from this presentation and it just so happens to coincide with being the most aggravating and worst thing from the Direct. The abundantly evident bust here is the Nintendo Switch Online program, and maybe even more so the terrible rollout of the program. Nintendo is bad with online stuff, the cloud save implementation is bad, the whole thing is bad. The only thing I have seen prior to this Direct is that the program is cheap, and it is comparatively speaking, at only $20 for the whole year it is merely a third of the cost of Microsoft and Sony’s similar programs. But, the whole defense of this thing can’t be “I mean, it’s only $20 a year” that doesn’t justify the issues. This Nintendo Direct was supposed to lay out plainly what is going on, but all they did was say it is coming in less than a week, didn’t explicitly specify that, you there that’s still playing Splatoon 2 or Mario Kart online, will have to now pay for that privilege, and didn’t cover the fact that you only get cloud saves by paying for it and, AND it doesn’t cover all games. Even when you pay for the “benefit” of having cloud saves so that you don’t lose dozens of hours of game saves even if you lose your Switch, you have to do further research to see which games are covered. Bad. Bad, bad, bad. BAD! Also, how many kids are going to their moms on September the 18th saying they need to sign up for $4 a month to keep playing Mario Kart, or if they get a Switch and Smash Bros. for the holidays they have to tell their parents they need to subscribe for $4 a month after spending $400 to play Smash with friends online. Honestly, I think if this was implemented at the start of the Switch lifecycle this makes sense and looks decent at $20 a year, but coming mid-life and bad communication of what this is is just… bad.

Bonus Bust:

Do not buy those NES controllers for $60. That is absurdly too expensive, only works with NES games and a better alternative is out there from 8BitDo.