.Keys: Nintendo customers do not care a bit. Youtubers will still make day 1 content, milk the hype like crazy. Customers will still pre order and play Switch 2, and in 5 to 10 years they will complain they can't play their games anymore, not knowing or understanding necessarily "why this all happened". toroca: I don't disagree with this, except for the fact that it's only aimed at
Nintendo customers. You could insert just about any major company that makes similar products and the same will still be true. The most obvious example to me is
Apple, which I hate with every fiber of my being, but I know countless Apple fanboys/girls who will buy anything the company makes and lavish praise on it even when it lacks features they wanted or includes things they don't want.
But there are similar fanbases for all kinds of huge corporations... Even EA has fans who think the company can do no wrong and apparently don't mind being
told what they want in a new product.
They're not mutually exclusive.
We can call out Apple, Nintendo, Valve and Microsoft fanboys/girls, all at the same time.
Any kind of fanboyism we see on the internet age is completely and utterly absurd.
It has been a while I've seen someone defending EA/Ubisoft-likes though.
Although I've seen with my own eyes people defending big companies with shady practices the same way some defend states (as in dictatorships) almost in the same way. The explanation to that to me is simple:
Some people think that their whole identity rely on following what should be only a fun hobby, making it a part of their own psychological being, as if it was in their own personality (as in Ego/Persona), to 'adore' a company, a person, a game (Can we talk about MMOs with shady practices and how their crowds defend them?), a state, an ideology, and so on.
They made such things their own identification persona, thus, if what they understand as a part of their own being is somehow attacked, they feel personally attacked, therefore, they must defend it with everything they have, otherwise they risk losing themselves or what they understand is part of their created psychological identity.
We can see this everywhere on the internet - actually - specially on the internet, where every means of communication we have are "false" identification personas. This is not a problem because it also means we can somewhat protect our personal and true identities (its the internet after all). The problem begins when people think their Twitter/X/BlueSky/Instagram/Facebook/YouTube/Twitch profile IS THEIR IDENTITY, or that a company's product IS PART OF THEIR IDENTITY.
I doubt common folk from the 100's~1800's, or, even, 1900's, or, even again, 1940~1980's even, had this kind of personal identification sickness we have nowadays with the internet on and out of any kind of social media. (As some papers show, Jonathan Haidt has some research on it: How the internet/social media affect early brain development and increase the chance of developing some sickness that otherwise would most probably not be present in early age.).
Anyway. I got carried away. This kind of mentality, that is, defending companies and their anti consumer/anti preservation practices, is just another sign that we are sick. And its an identity sickness/crisis.