 Hi, I am Nathaniel Rumpeljantz, your local boss man, and today I am here to give you an episode that many of you might dislike me about by the end of it. This is my top three reasons that I am frustrated with Nintendo at the beginning of 2015. The last episode, which happened a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was going to be raging with eternal fire. At my frustrations with Nintendo, I've kind of reached a boiling point, a tipping point as it were, and I've had a couple weeks to sit on it now and kind of let it calm down. And obviously Majora's Mask 3D came out in that time, and I've been super excited about it. I mean, come on, like one of these bad boys. I'm still frustrated with Nintendo, no matter how much stuff they throw at me that I want, it doesn't make me any less upset with them at the beginning of 2015. So for a rare occasion here, I am actually going to be kind of mean to Nintendo and tell you the three things about them right now that frustrate me so much. Reason number one, the new Nintendo 3DS XL. This thing, right here, this thing, these, frustrated by Nintendo. The new Nintendo 3DS XL is something I actually like. As a consumer, it gives me everything that I want out of the 3DS systems. My biggest complaints about the original 3DS and the 3DS XL and the 2DS is how sluggish the operating system felt to me. It was extremely slow, just switching from a simple app to another app, switching back from a game to the internet browser, or even using things like Nevers. It felt like none of, it felt like the console was literally just built to play games, and all this extra stuff you can do in the operating system just wasn't functionally working as well as it could. And most of this has to do with the speed in which it loaded, some of the crashing errors, and the new Nintendo 3DS fixes all of that. The new Nintendo 3DS also offers like an extra C-Stake and all this stuff. You guys know about the new Nintendo 3DS XL by now, right? Why am I frustrated with Nintendo about this? Well, for starters, Nintendo of America, you could just... Why? Because you only gave us the 3DS, the new Nintendo 3DS XL. Why can't we get the one with faceplates? And this is what frustrates me about it even more, is faceplates just like amiibo were a great way. See this, this is an amiibo. An amiibo. Us in America make up 68% of the sales of amiibo worldwide. So if we make up so many of the sales of this, how many of the sales do you think we would make up I can have this bad boy a little bit smaller or have faceplates. In fact, remember the old controversy over not being able to get this and being sold out at retailers? You could have this exact same faceplate a little bit smaller for the regular new Nintendo 3DS and it would sell like gangbusters in the United States. So it's a missed sales opportunity. And what was Nintendo's excuse for all of this, or I'm sorry, Nintendo of America's excuse for all of this, they felt that it would confuse the marketplace. If the marketplace is confused, it's kind of your own fault. Let me explain this. You had the 2DS, which came out after the 3DS and after the 3DS XL. For some reason you call it the 2DS because it doesn't have 3D. I get it. That was the point. And it doesn't clamp down. It's not a clamshell design because it's made so kids can beat it up and not break it. I get it. Fine. I get why it exists. But if you think adding in the new Nintendo 3DS XL is any less confusing compared to the 3DS XL, which you still sell, then I don't get why it would matter if you put the new Nintendo 3DS, the normal edition out there. In fact, you could argue that since the new Nintendo 3DS XL costs what the 3DS XL used to cost or still costs today depending on where you go, you could argue that you could bring in the new Nintendo 3DS and you could slowly phase out the original 3DS and the 3DS XL because the new systems could cost exactly what the old systems cost. So you could bring in these new systems, stop making the old systems, and then so everyone who buys a new 3DS in the future is going to have the new Nintendo 3DS or the new Nintendo 3DS XL. And where's the confusion? It's gone because the 3DS and the 3DS XL, the original editions would no longer be available to purchase as brand new systems. You could only buy the used. So where's the confusion in that to consumers? That's what I don't get. If the new Nintendo 3DS XL isn't considered confusing in that of itself, despite the fact you're still selling the original 3DS XL, then the new Nintendo 3DS is no more confusing than what you're already trying to pander to us out here. This is just as confusing as the normal Nintendo 3DS would be. So you could have easily introduced both and phased out the old hardware. On top of that, the new Nintendo 3DS XL had issues with pre-orders, which I understand aren't 100% Nintendo's fault. There was a strike on the west coast in the United States at the harbors that chopped about 70% of the workforce off. So Nintendo had, admitted by Iowa, and Nintendo had a whole bunch of new Nintendo 3DS XL systems sitting on a boat in a crate. I get it. That's not Nintendo's fault. There was a labor issue in the United States that Nintendo doesn't control those specific laborers. So I get it. But it is Nintendo's fault that we don't have the new Nintendo 3DS, that we don't have faceplates, which Americans have proven we will buy the crap out of that kind of stuff. Just look at the sales of Miibo. Look at how fast this guy sold out. I mean, look how fast these sold out. We will buy that stuff because it's cool. It's interesting. I am very positively sure that those themes that you combine with your 3DS are selling extremely well in the United States. So why? Why don't you give us what we want? And now for the bigger, broader spectrum with the new Nintendo 3DS and my issues and my frustrations with Nintendo and how it expands beyond Nintendo of America is region locking. None of this would be an issue or it wouldn't be as big of an issue if region locking didn't exist because I, as a consumer that wanted the smaller version with the faceplates, could have imported a new Nintendo 3DS and used it locally just like I planned to import faceplates that are exclusive to Japan or exclusive to Europe. I could import those. As a consumer, it would still be an option for me. But because the region locking exists, I don't read Japanese and I'm not going to pay for games in Europe and then have games that are locked to Europe and games that are locked to this in the United States and be okay with that as a consumer. Region locking was something that Iowa has addressed on a couple occasions, saying that they were looking into alternatives to kind of get rid of it. And I thought the new Nintendo 3DS was the perfect chance to be, you know what, let's just get rid of it now. It's towards the end of the generation for the 3DS. The old 3DS hardware can be region locked. This stuff cannot be region locked and we'll just deal with the consequences from there. And I think you would have saw more sales, more game sales. And I understand, you know, there's a fear of pirating and all this stuff. That's fine. That's dandy. But you know what? We are in 2015. The PlayStation 4 isn't region locked. The Xbox One is not region locked. The PlayStation Vita isn't region locked. You are the only gaming company making hardware that is still region locked. So frustrated. Frustrated and upset with you about that. That was point one. Reason number two. YouTube policies. Okay, you have launched a beta for your Nintendo's creator program. Now, there's two sides of the coin on this argument. One, you could say you were starting to copyright videos on YouTube and taking all of the revenue. You've copyrighted some of our videos on our YouTube channel and are taking all of the revenue from it. And that's fine for us because we don't actually put ads intentionally on our videos. So if you ever see ads on our videos, that's because Nintendo or another third party person put those ads on our video through copyright claims. And that's fine. For someone like us just being able to get a kickback out of ads that we didn't want on our videos to begin with, it's fine. That works for us. But there's a lot of Nintendo content creators out there that do this stuff for a living. Imagine the game explains of the world. Or the bit blocks of the world. Or some of the let's players out there. Imagine that they are told by Nintendo that you can now get some money off these videos in which we claimed all of it. You can only get, say, 60%. And you're only going to get that 60% if you cover certain games. Any other Nintendo game you cover, we're not going to give you anything for. Or you want to go back in time and, say, play Castlevania or something. We're going to claim all the revenue and you're not going to get it because it didn't make this imaginary or this completely made up list of games that you're allowed to create content for and make money. You can still create content for any game you want, if you're going to claim the money. It doesn't fit this whitelist. And if you want to claim, try to claim your whole YouTube channel because you want to bump it that extra 10% to get 70% by having every video you submit just automatically go through Nintendo's program and make money off of it. Well, you have to conform to that whitelist. So say you have videos for Super Smash Brothers for the 3DS or Super Smash Brothers for Wii U. You are not going to get that 70% for your channel because you have videos of a game that's not on their whitelist. That's silly. That's silly. It's already silly in that Nintendo even wants a piece of this advertising pie because it's just going to hurt their brand. There are numerous videos out there. I'll put a few links down in the description of content creators that have basically sworn off Nintendo games. They were already pretty much sworn off when Nintendo took all of the money but Nintendo promised this program coming in and then this program turns out it's still keeping, you know, a 30-40% chunk of the money. You know, I think creators would have been fine if it was something like a 10% royalty fee. You know, if we were talking a 90% to the creators and then a 10% royalty fee just because the game they're playing is by Nintendo, that might have been something that I feel would have been a bit acceptable. And remember, all of this comes after YouTube and Google get their cut of the money, which it makes sense because they're the video platform owners. So they should have, and they're the ones who can all the ads up. So they have a right to some of that income. But I mean, that means the content creators have less and then Nintendo wants to take part of that pool and then plus you have the taxes and all these other fees that go on top of the money that comes in. Really, they're just telling YouTubers that hey, don't make Nintendo content. That's not good. I have a lot of recently said that TV advertisements are, and price cuts are not a way to generate good sales anymore. And I disagree to a point but I'll get back to that. The idea here when you combine it with the YouTube is that one of the best free advertisement avenues that Nintendo has is user-generating content. And that's what YouTube is. It's user-generated content. So you can have all these YouTubers advertising your stuff for you if you would just let them. Imagine how much goodwill you could build for, say, a game like Kirby, Canvas Curse if you would allow YouTubers to have 100% of that revenue. Or even 90%. But 100% would be the best way to go. Let's say it's 90%. Imagine if, say, PewDiePie, the most popular name on YouTube with the most followers and everything was more willing to play something like Kirby, Canvas Curse, a game that probably isn't going to get a lot of attention just because now he gets all the revenue from it. And that's free advertising for that game. His followers are going to see that game because he feels compelled to use it so he gets the full revenue from that video. That's what I don't understand. If TV is not what you think is going to give you sales, if cutting prices is not what you think is going to give you sales, then what is? Really the best way to advertise is user-generated content. And this is before I get into my frustration with Iowa to say that TV doesn't matter. You know how many Xbox One and PlayStation 4 commercials I see every day? I see at least a dozen for each. And you know how many Nintendo commercials I see? They're rarely on TV and where's the Wii U commercials? These apparently don't sell consoles and I disagree with them. I'm not saying that it's because the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are selling better than the Wii U, that that's evidence that... What those TV commercials do is they make your brand known. No, it's not going to make people go out and buy Wii U or make people go out and buy 3DS anymore, but it is going to make your brand more known. Imagine that you were seeing 12 Wii U commercials a day. Do you think people would be confused on what the Wii U is? Heck, people that don't own it would at least be aware that the Wii U exists and that it is the next Wii. Nintendo just says, nope, TV commercials, they don't work. They're important for branding, okay? Just like these YouTube content generators. They help you with sales because they increase the brand of the product. So say at Kirby's Canvas Curse was again played by PewDiePie. PewDiePie has way more followers than copies of the game we're going to sell. So imagine that only a thousand of his followers pick up that copy because of what he did. That's a thousand more customers you weren't going to have. And for some reason, claiming the revenue is more important to you. And I get it, because if you put up the video and that video had say 100 million views and Nintendo gets, you know, 40% of it, that's a big cut, or you could just not do the video at all and Nintendo gets absolutely no benefit. That's what's happening. And obviously the YouTubers that exclusively do Nintendo content are really hurt. Because now, if they do content on Smash Bros, they're not going to get any money out for it. If they do content for any game not on the white list, they're not going to get any money. And for the games on the white list that they do content for, they're only going to get so much. And on top of that, these videos have to be approved by Nintendo. They're not just automatic. Like, oh, I did a video about Twilight Princess. And so now we did a Let's Play for Twilight Princess. And so our Let's Play for Twilight Princess has automatically given us money. No, Nintendo has to also approve of the video. Which means they have to approve of the content in the video. So if they don't like how you are framing the game or your language, they could say, nope, not taken it. Now, we don't have any evidence that they are doing that. That a video has been rejected because it talks negatively about a game. But that's just a natural assumption. Because if Nintendo is going through the work to control or review what these videos are saying message-wise, you figure that they're doing that because they want a certain message to be conveyed. And that means suddenly that your content and your messaging could be partially controlled. So now if you review a game in a video, Nintendo can influence you to be positive about it. And that's... that don't fly, man. That don't fly in my book. We don't know that Nintendo is throwing out videos that are negative, but why else do you have to review how the content's presented? Makes no sense to me! And my last reason, and this is a more personal reason, and it's not going to affect many of you guys, and you might think of me as a spoiled brat for this reason, I'm really, really, really upset at Nintendo's handling of review copies so far in 2015. We had no problem getting a review copy of Hyder Warriors. We had absolutely no problem getting a review copy of Smash Bros. 3DS. Nor did we have a problem getting a review copy of Super Smash Bros. 4 Wii U. Those were the three games last year that Zelda Informer wanted review copies of because there were Zelda characters involved in those games. And this year, obviously Majora's Mask 3D came and we wanted a review copy. We wanted the review copy before the review embargo came up because we wanted to be able to give you our unique perspective as veteran Zelda gamers on what we think of the changes in the game, what we think of the game in general, and be able to help inform our fans that, hey, you know, is this so worthy if you have the original 3D... if you have Majora's Mask already from the N64, if you have it in your Wii console, or if you ported it from your Wii console to your Wii U, is this worth picking up if you basically already have the game? And we wanted to tell you. We wanted to inform you on that and we couldn't. We could not do what we feel is a service to our fans. Service for you guys because Nintendo did not give enough review copies to their review firm, Golan Harris. Yeah, we're one of the largest Zelda sites in the world and I don't want to feel entitled that, to get everything we asked Nintendo for because we are Zelda informer. What frustrated me is that Golan Harris was out of the loop. They were told that they were going to get a bunch of review copies for the game and then they got a fraction of those review copies. And then Nintendo on top of that was sending out their own copies. You guys saw some of the YouTube videos and stuff that popped up. There were YouTubers that were getting this bad boy and this game and even this guy. They were getting them in the mail without even asking for them. And they weren't reviewing them or anything. It was a way, I think it was Iowa's way of advertising. We'll just give free stuff to YouTubers who will then put it up because hey, we got free stuff. And that's great. That's good for those YouTubers. That doesn't make people want to buy the game. There were YouTubers that got the stuff that actively said they do not like Zelda games and they do not play the games that Nintendo was sending them. What kind of free advertising is it if the people that are getting the stuff don't actively promote it. They just say, hey look, I'm posting a video because we got some free stuff. And the thing is I'm generally passionate about that kind of stuff. And I think we at Zelda Informer are generally passionate about that stuff. So the fact that we didn't get a review copy so we could actually help influence potential sales for Nintendo based on what we were saying. Obviously we could influence them for the negative but even if we said negative stuff we could have provided video content and streaming and asked questions and we could have done so much content for you guys. Instead we got our review copy the week the game came out and we got it not in time to do anything. To do a review to get our walkthrough ready which we feel is a vital part of our website. And now here I am two, three weeks removed from the game coming up and I'm still working on our walkthrough because hey, they decided we were not important enough to get the game or Nintendo decided we were not important enough to get the game. So I wrote a letter kind of a nasty letter to Golan Harris because at the time I was only aware of what Golan Harris had done. Golan Harris had basically promised us a review copy so we would get it on time get it on time, reviews came out I sent a couple more emails to them never got a response and then I sent a rather nasty letter about how we were one of the founders of the movement to get the game done even though that movement might not have had anything to do with it I was just kind of trying to throw some extra weight behind the email and I said we're one of the largest outlets for Zelda I think the last thing Nintendo wants to do is upset one of their major Zelda outlets I was like I don't want to say something negative about Nintendo like I'm doing right now So I kind of felt insulted and slapped in the face that we could not get a review copy of a remake when we got a review copy of Herb Warriors Smash Bros and the other Smash Bros game in plenty of time to do content and whatever else we wanted to do for it as it turns out my Golan Harris emails and becks us hey hope you know I have shipped her email off to Nintendo themselves which is great that means Nintendo's internal PR people are going to see it and magically as soon as that happened a few days later we got a review copy obviously like I said it wasn't in time it was literally just before the game came out but we did get a review copy after Nintendo read a rather nasty email from us and that makes me upset I basically had to squeeze Nintendo by the balls to get a digital code just so people know most review copies we get don't come in the form of this we don't get we usually don't get hardware we've requested hardware like when the Wii U was launched and 3DS was launched we requested the hardware but we've never gotten hardware so I did request hardware I didn't think we were going to get it so I didn't expect that but I also requested the game they used to send you physical copies of the game but since the Wii U came out it's all been digital for us so what that means is they send you an email with a download code and Nintendo could have just sent us a code a little download code to get the game in time and that takes them no time at all to generate codes to download something and for some reason they not only couldn't send golden hairs enough of those we had to twist their balls to get one that's right I had to twist Nintendo's ballsack to get a review copy code I mean come on Nintendo come on I mean YouTube the new Nintendo 3DS XL bullshit review copies Jesus next thing you're going to tell me oh guess what you guys aren't important enough to get the Wii U a week before the Zelda U comes out just because we're not going to let you know if we have a new console coming anytime soon we're just going to be see this? see this Nintendo? this is what you're going to do to me okay I'm actually not going to snap his head but that's Nintendo stop doing this to us stop doing this to me alright that's it for this week's episode join me next week I am unsure what the topic is going to be at this time I'm fumbling around with a few ideas I really know what you thought of this week's episode if you have any frustrations you want to get out of the way for Nintendo to start off 2015 and hopefully the year ends on a lot more positive note good job Nintendo see you at E3