Nintendo’s emphatic dislike of sharing has reached a bizarre new level, with the Nintendo Today app now stopping users from screenshotting or videoing its advertising material.
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Nintendo Today is just ads. There’s nothing wrong with that—plenty of people want to get new Nintendo information—and the app is a fun, if cumbersome, way of hearing the latest about what Nintendo is hoping you’ll buy. But, whichever way you slice it, it’s a commercial tool for plugging games and devices. Today on Today, underneath a cute animation from Tears of the Kingdom, you can watch a 21-second video about Donkey Kong’s hand slap in forthcoming Switch 2 title Donkey Kong Bananza.
“Cool!” you might think. “James’ll love that! I’ll grab a screenshot of the video and send it to him.” Or, if you don’t know James, you might think, “Ooh, I’m so excited for Donkey Kong Bananza! I’m going to post a video clip of this on my BlueSky account!” Except, no, you won’t do any of this. Now all you’ll get is a black screen. Here’s a screenshot I took today:
Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku
I can right now, on an Android phone, still screenshot the text-based stories, such as the one plugging the new Switch 2 “All-in-One” carrying case, and I can capture the screenshots recently uploaded from Mario Kart World. (Except, with the latter, the shots are included in landscape, in an app that only runs in portrait, with no way to zoom in or rotate them. Just stellar work.) It’s just videos that are being blocked.
Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku
Let’s be unambiguously clear: Publisher-provided screenshots and videos of a game are advertising. They have only ever been advertising. The games media is guilty of having allowed such things to be commoditized, fighting one another for the “exclusive” to publish such commercials on their own website, then becoming furious when another site reprints the adverts they wanted to be the only one to show. But ads they remain.
They exist to promote a game, with the intention of building interest and excitement in a product, and the goal of increasing sales. That’s it. That’s what they’re for. And here’s Nintendo, very cleverly encouraging millions of people to install an app on their phones that only serves to show its users these ads, and then going out of its way to stop their being shared? That’s bonkers.
But, it feels very par for Nintendo’s course. Sharing is such an anathema to this company that it even applies it to its own game footage and trailers—clips you’d imagine were created with the express purpose of being seen by as many people as possible. But no! Shut that shit down! People might get ideas.
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