 Hey everyone, welcome back to this special edition of Here's the News. We got a lot to talk about today, including this thing up here, we got some news on that in regards to something switch related. We also have a couple stories from Nintendo, three in fact. One of them is actually about Metroid Prime Trilogy, yes folks, we also have some stuff on Nintendo's financials. And by the way, yeah Nintendo responded to a rumor. For the first time in company history, yeah it actually happened and I'll be able to show you directly from them in case they end up deleting it, which I doubt they're going to because it's already public knowledge. That being said, before we get into the rest of this video, we do have a new giveaway going on. We are giving away a Nintendo Switch OLED edition. That's right folks, I was able to get two pre-orders in, one for me and one for one of you. This will be a white model version, which to me is the better looking model. I know some people will refer to the black, but I am very, very cognizant of that white and I also think it really fits well with Metroid Dread. So if a Metroid fan wins it, all the better. Because this pre-order is at Amazon, however, I will only be shipping it to people in the United States, Canada or Mexico. So essentially North America, I'm sorry to everyone else in the world. If you would like to enter and you're from one of those territories, aka from anywhere in North America, only one thing you got to do, subscribe to the channel. That's it. No fancy links to click, no confirmations, and even just be subscribed to the channel. We have a lot to get into today and we're starting with the Valve Steam Deck. Not Stream Deck. Not to be confused with this thing right here. See this? That's a Stream Deck XL. Not to be confused with that. We're talking about the Valve Steam Deck, a system that's basically like a switch without detachable Joy-Cons, like a dock with your TV, except it's for running PC games. And we've seen devices like this over the years and I'm not going to give my overall opinions on it, but this device obviously is drawing comparisons to Nintendo Switch. And it's significantly more powerful, by the way. It's like three times, maybe four times more powerful than a Nintendo Switch. And the lowest priced model is just $400 US, and as you can see here, it can dock and then you can use it with mouse and keyboard, with a monitor, with TVs, all that jazz. Now the dock is sold separately, so technically I think the whole package with the docks $500, but neither here nor there, that's still priced for performance wise, way better than even the Switch OLED, which I mean the Switch OLED has no performance increase, so sure, no better than Switch Lite, I don't know. But we have some news on this, because one of the major issues with Nintendo Switch is the joysticks, Joy-Con drift is a big problem with Switch, whether you've experienced it or not, enough people have, and it's definitely at a rate that's significantly higher than other joystick drift, which happens on every single controller eventually. So two of the engineers behind this platform talked with IGN, and we're asked specifically about this problem, because if this also has drift, that's an issue, these aren't detachable, you can't replace them, obviously you can take it apart and manually replace them, but yeah, if they're not detachable and you can't replace the controller, that could be a long term issue for this platform. So here's what they had to say, this first comment comes from Yazan, all the high yet. He says, we've done a ton of testing on reliability on all fronts really, and all inputs, and different environmental factors, and all that kind of stuff. I think we feel that this will perform really well, and I think people will be super happy with it. I think it's going to be a great buy. I mean, obviously every part will fail at some point. We think people will be very satisfied and happy with this. And then another engineer named John Akaitis said the following, we purposely picked something that we knew the performance of, right? We didn't want to take a risk on that, right? As I'm sure our customers don't want us to take a risk on that either, and that's kind of a, hey, Nintendo took a risk and didn't work out. We're not going to take a risk. We're going to use a part that everyone already uses and everyone already knows about. Which tells me they're using the same joystick as, well, what's in this? See this? This is a Power A controller. Do I have my Xbox controller? No, I don't. This is a Power A controller. It uses a really basic joystick part that every controller uses. That Xbox and PlayStation 5, everyone uses basically the same joystick design. That joystick design isn't even the best one to use, but that's the one that we got. So take that for what you will. That is just what we get to deal with today. Now, what's interesting here, of course, is that it's using that so it'll have problems someday. The problems are going to be just what you expect. Our next story deals with these three lovely people. We got Shintura Furukawa. We got Shigeruimono. We got Shinya Takahashi. These people all got bonuses at Nintendo. Normally, I wouldn't really care about what their bonuses are, and I still really don't care that much other than to note that I wish the rest of the video game industry would follow Nintendo's example because they were handed bonuses based on the unexpected profit margins Nintendo had over the last year. And here's what their total salaries were quite recently for the past year. Shintura Furukawa made $2.9 million at $710,500 fixed salary with a $2.19 million as a performance compensation. Shigeruimono made $2.3 million with $665,992 as a fixed situation with $1.64 million as its compensation. $1.64 million, I should say. Shinya Takahashi made $1.75 million with $109,332 as a fixed income with $1.64 million as a compensation. And this is all figures in USD. And I find this to be a really big deal, mostly because Nintendo is a multi-billion dollar company. They're the richest company in Japan, they've got $9 plus billion in the bank, they have zero debt anywhere, so including their IP value, their actual equipment value, obviously brand name value, and obviously money in the bank with no debt. Nintendo is literally one of the most valuable companies in the world, let alone in Japan. And this man right here, Shigeruimono, the creator of all these IPs, I would say he's got a priceless value to the industry, but I mean probably in the billions, right? Most people would say he's probably worth billions of dollars, his IPs are certainly worth billions of dollars altogether, so it's very interesting to see they're hardly paid anything and Nintendo doesn't really fire anybody. They just always hire new people. I mean, I'm not saying there aren't edge cases where people get fired, but it's never really for salary situation. They're like, oh man, we gotta cut part of the Zelda team because we're not making enough money. No, if they've cut someone, it's probably because they didn't show up to work or something like that, disobeyed company policy or something like that, right? The people who probably deserve to be let go. Nintendo holds on to pretty much all their employees, in fact most employees that join the company stay there on average of 15 to 20 plus years. That's a long time for anyone to stay at a single company and that's because Nintendo's retention rate is off the charts because they compensate well, they pay well, they give great benefits and their top guys don't feel like they're fleecing everybody else. Oh, Nintendo has record profits. Oh, we're going to give Shintura Furukawa a hundred million dollars, which they could and not even Batonai, but they don't because they don't want the compensation to be that drastic in comparison to the rest of the company. I wish the Bobby Kotiks and the Andrew Wilson's and all that of the world would take note of this, it creates a happier work environment and enables you to not fire a bunch of employees while posting record profits. I don't know what the hell Activision's doing. But yeah, even Ysgema, like, hey, I know you got other issues at your company right now, but maybe a better spreading out of wealth among your employees should be at the top of the list of priorities at your company. Just saying. So far, our next story here. Nintendo is responding to a rumor, believe it or not. I know they never respond to rumors. I've been covering Nintendo for almost 20 years. Yeah, there's they don't respond to anything, especially when it's unprompted. I mean, you'll get questions in investors meeting and sometimes they'll give you a little nugget, but they never do direct unprompted responses to anything. But this time, Nintendo is taking their best shot at Takahashi Matsuzuki, aka the man who's been leaking everything about the switch, switch light, switch pro, switch OLED. Yeah, for a while. And one of his most recent reports he did mention that Nintendo takes about $10 worth of parts, you know, for switch OLED and then charges us $50 more, so $10 increase in parts. Now, this is not something he was basing on actual sources for manufacturing. What he was doing was talking to industry analysts who are more familiar with this and other companies and the increased cost of some of these parts and then making an estimation off of that to get to that $10 mark, making it look like Nintendo's just making bank, which Nintendo probably is making bank on switch because it's using 2015 technology, hasn't really been updated in four years. Things tend to get a bit cheaper, although I'm sure prices went up a little bit during the pandemic. They're probably on the way back down. I'm sure Nintendo's making a decent penny per OG switch sold, probably even a decent penny off switch light. So yeah, they're going to be making profits on switch OLED as well, more profits than they were making before switch OLED, but maybe not to the degree that it seemed like he did or $10 increase with $50 increase in price. Essentially, I think Nintendo could probably sell switch OLED at $299.99 and still make some sort of profit, even if it's a very slim margin. That being said, Nintendo decided to respond and not just to that, but also to other things that Takahashi has said. And we have it up here. This comes from Nintendo company, LTD's Twitter account. This is their investors Twitter account. And it says a news report on July 15th, 2021 claimed that the profit margin of the Nintendo switch OLED model would increase compared to the Nintendo switch to ensure correct understanding among our investors and customers. We want to make clear that this claim is incorrect. We also want to clarify that we just announced that Nintendo switch OLED model will launch in October of 2021 and have no plans for launching any other model at this time. So two parts to this, one obviously dealing with the price and one obviously dealing with all the switch pro rumors. So the first part, I think, is pretty stock standard. I don't know why Nintendo is even mentioning it. I think what happened is Nintendo's stock price went down after the announcement of switch OLED. But I don't think it's because the switch OLED costs $350. Nintendo is misconstruing why the stock price went down. It went down because investors don't think that's good enough of an upgrade in today's world of PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X. Now we have the Steam Deck, which is going to really make the system, really put the pressure on Nintendo, at least from an investor's perspective. I don't think the market's going to put as much pressure on them as investors think it will, but investors will certainly pressure Nintendo over the Steam Deck, especially at the next investors meeting. I guarantee someone else is going to bring it up and ask Nintendo, how can you charge this when this costs this? What are you doing? Are you going to release more powerful hardware, et cetera? So what do we learn from this then? Well, what we learn is that obviously Nintendo is saying, hey, look, that report that the reports only cost $10 more is wrong. They don't tell us how wrong it is. They don't say they're not making more money. It's just not the margin that we think it is. And then two, when they say they have no plans for launching any other model at this time, this is where people are going to get mad at me. This isn't them saying they're not going to launch new Switch hardware eventually, just not now. They are launching Switch OLED in October. Of course, there's not going to be any other model of Switch coming at this time because we haven't even got the new model they just announced at this time. We need to wait for that model to come out. So, yeah, a year from now, they can easily launch a new model or a year after that or a year after that or every year. Nintendo could do whatever the hell they feel like. It's just this doesn't mean that a more powerful Switch doesn't exist somewhere or a next gen. So it's just, hey, the race is saying, stop talking about it and ain't coming any time soon, screw you, Bloomberg, without using that kind of sort of direct talking point. So I don't know. You guys don't know what you think about this. It's a very interesting story. I'm curious why Nintendo responded at all. And let's get into our last story because this last one, this is the one I'm most excited about. So this last story deals with Metroid Prime Trilogy HD, the long rumored game, you know, collection of games for the Metroid Prime that people felt would come up before Metroid Prime 4. The problem is we don't know what Metroid Prime 4 is coming. And while it's been talked about and rumored that this game has been done for maybe even a couple of years, Metroid Prime 4 is not. But we have some details here that are interesting. And the main one being that, yeah, Jeff Grubb from Venture Beat, who now also works at Giant Palm, who was on the Giant Bomb Cast recently, noted that, yeah, guess what? The Metroid Prime Trilogy HD is ready to go. And Nintendo is just waiting and sitting on it. Here's what he had to say, exact quotes on the bomb cast. The game is done and Nintendo is holding it. Whether or not Nintendo releases it now or later depends on other factors. I think the game is sitting in their pocket for whenever Nintendo decides it's the right time. And Nintendo has done this a lot recently, so it's not unusual. It's not a sign of some bad thing happening. It's not a sign of a lack of faith in Metroid. Nintendo can afford to sit on it, and that's how they're treating it. I think a big problem for Nintendo for quite some time during the pandemic was quality assurance. I think Nintendo was focusing its quality assurance resources on one or two big projects at a time. And that meant that some games were basically finished were sitting on the side while they had that lockdown to secure quality assurance processes focused on one or two more important games. Japan is still dealing with these issues. So I don't think these processes are going to open up anytime soon. The other factor for Metroid Prime Trilogy is that it's definitely going to be marketing beat for Metroid Prime 4. Almost certainly. So right now we're getting Metroid Dread this year. Then I would imagine Metroid Prime Trilogy as something they'll release close to the release of Metroid Prime 4 whenever that is. And this is speculation for me. Anyways, you know, he's saying that, hey, he knows this thing is done and ready to go. I personally think that he's right in his assessment that, hey, what Nintendo is really waiting for and they've been waiting for this whole time is Metroid Prime 4. Metroid Prime 4 is supposed to be out by now. It was starting development back in 2017. We're supposed to have it already. But development got rebooted at the end of 2018, if not the beginning of 2019, as Nintendo announced themselves. So since development was completely rebooted, that obviously pushed the release date back. So even if Metroid Prime Trilogy HD was ready to go in, say, 2019, it doesn't really matter because why would you release that now when the other game's still years off? I think they want to use that as a marketing push, as he said. So say they're not going to show you Metroid Prime Trilogy HD until they're going to show you Metroid Prime 4. I think that's my big takeaway here. And I do think it's probably going to come out before like six months, maybe even a year before Metroid Prime 4. But we need to at least see Metroid Prime 4 and have a release year. I think before we're going to see Metroid Prime Trilogy HD and see a release for that. This is a fan made trailer. Obviously, the games don't exist in HD. They have done the Metroid Prime Trilogy before back on. We there's some other rumors out there around this as well. We'll see if I decide to cover those. I'm still vetting whether they're worth covering because there's a bunch of Nintendo rumors from the source here that I'm not sure that I think is worth reporting on. But we'll we'll see what I what I dig up later today. Maybe I'll bring it up at least on tonight's live stream for anyone who's interested, even if I don't think they're that credible. But we'll have to wait and see on that. Anyways, thank you guys so much for tuning in. I am Tanner Rubeljans from Nintendo Prime. This is here's the news. Be sure to subscribe if not because you want to win the Switch OLED because you enjoy the content and you want to see more of it. Thank you guys and I'll catch you in the next episode.