 We have a three pack of Nintendo news to drop for you today. A legend appears to be hanging up his, well, development boots, maybe, at least temporarily. We also have some information on the split of digital and physical game sales worldwide in 2022. And I'm not so sure you guys are gonna take this news very well. Also, we have an official update on Joy-Con Drift, a legal update that may or may not affect how Nintendo approaches Joy-Cons and future controllers. So stay tuned right after I let you know about our sponsor today. I saw our first story deals with the man himself, the myth, the legend, the one and only Masahiro Sakurai. He did an extensive interview around his YouTube channel. And during that interview, he mentioned that he is actually retired, or at least retired for now. He is just 52 years old. But his reasoning was that after making Smash for Wii U, 3DS and Switch, he spent basically a decade straight in active development without breaks. And he feels like if he keeps up that pace, his life will just pass him by. You know, one of those situations where you wake up one day and you wonder, what the hell have I been doing? I get it. You wanna actually enjoy other parts of your life, not just work. Part of this is why he's doing the YouTube channel right now. So he could share the knowledge he has gained as a developer with everyone. He didn't rule out ever making another game. And he's on record in the past saying he doesn't believe another Super Smash Bros. game can exist without him. And he would listen should Nintendo ask him to make one if they are willing to let him take it in a new direction. But he's not presently listening to any other offers from anyone else. And he is not right now actively developing anything. It's just his YouTube channel and enjoying life. Other tidbits from the interview because again, this was mostly about his YouTube channel. He's thrilled with the response to his YouTube videos. He has a 99% like to dislike ratio. He does read the comments on his videos and is very pleased to see a positive response to every video he puts up. He wants his videos to be from his experience but he does consult with Nintendo on some things. He thinks it's near impossible for any other developer to do a channel that's like his. And he doesn't have like a film crew or anything he films everything by himself. His scripts do occasionally need approval from Nintendo who has been very supportive in the new venture. He records nonstop through his mistakes. So a little bit behind the scenes on his process. And then he edits out the mistakes before sending the film to a video editor. He will also record all of his own gameplay or most of it if needed. Cubist also helps with some of the gameplay recording and eight forge handles all the translations. He also gives suggestions to Sakurai if a game isn't well known outside of Japan. He records his videos at night so the sound of traffic is gone but sometimes he still needs to reshoot it due to an ambulance or other emergency vehicle noise. His YouTube channel may at one point come to a sudden end sort of like his Fumitsu column but he wanted it to exist as a permanent archive of his work. Sakurai was the on camera personality and voice for Sakurai presents primarily due to budget and information accuracy. So they could have hired celebrities but it was just a lot cheaper for Sakurai to do it himself. As for what he's beaten recently just to remind everyone, hey, I still play games. He cleared Sonic Frontiers, Bayonetta 3 and God of War Ragnarok and next up he's looking at Tactics Ogre and potentially Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. Although he does mention it's really hard for him to play games that take hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours just because it soaks up too much of his time that he wants to be able to do other things and not just play games all the time. So there is that. So he's not really sure which one he's gonna go to next. He is worried about the internet in general as he feels like people are too negative and attacking each other way too often. There's some other additional details as well but the interview is entirely in Japanese so we're working mostly off of Push Dustin's translations over on Twitter. So shout out to him. Honestly Sakurai is a treasure and if he wants to take time to himself, take time to his family, take time to do the things he wants to do outside of game development, more power to him. I don't think this is the last we've seen of Sakurai as a game developer but if it is, he's just letting us know that hey, you know, he doesn't know, he might not make any more games again and obviously Nintendo, if they want him to do more Smash in the future, you know, I think they'd be lenient and sort of let him do what he wants with it but it's gonna be a completely different vision than what we're used to so I guess time will tell. Now our next story, this is a weird one because essentially gameindustry.biz did a ton of research, worked with a bunch of different data collection firms and they came to a conclusion on the split of digital and physical software sales. Now notably before I give you the percentages here, this does include Nintendo games but it only includes Nintendo's physical sales because Nintendo does not publish their digital sales. Now sometimes you could figure it out if you could figure out a rough estimate of their total physical compared to the total number of sales of a game reported but they didn't do that sort of math, they're working just with exact figures and exact facts they can get from the NPD, from the various UK reports, Famitsu and all these other organizations out there. So they're doing the best they can but since Nintendo doesn't provide digital data their digital sales aren't included which is kind of unfortunate because it does mean the percentage of digital and physical would actually go even higher for digital. Now what is the percentage they came to right now? 72% of games sold in 2022 were digital meaning only 28% were physical. And again, if Nintendo included digital sales data chances are it's like 75 to maybe even 80% of all sales are digital, if not higher because we obviously don't know what the percent cut of digital sales is for Nintendo. But yeah, that's a really high figure. Now obviously this is gonna include a bunch of games that are only available digitally so there is that but still it does kind of show that physical is clearly on its way out. This is a much bigger split than when it was 60, 40 physical digital just 10 years ago. So we're getting to this point where physical releases are only really gonna start to make sense for the biggest of games but hey, this is something to pay attention to. I really hope the physical medium isn't going anywhere but time will tell. Next up, a government group in the UK has figured out what is going on with Joy-Cons and why we have Joy-Con drift. Now we've had our theories and Spawnwave did a breakdown a long time ago and we sorta kinda know what the issues are but we've never had it scientifically verified like we have now. So a UK consumer group did lab tests, actual lab tests on Joy-Cons and it seems to have proven that there is an actual design flaw. It dissected five different, I don't know, not a huge segment but five different Joy-Cons from different time periods of the Switch's life that all have drift to determine the cause. Now all five of the Joy-Cons did have debris in them suggesting Nintendo's little rubber lip is not actually adequate at keeping out debris. In fact, some people have argued that rubber lip actually drags debris in so there is that. But they didn't obviously do extensive testing to see if the rubber lip's dragging debris in or not. That's more of a theory. That being said, they're not saying that debris are exactly what the issue is. Every single one of them had wear and tear on their contact pads caused by a mechanical flaw in design. So they're not even blaming the debris. They're just saying, hey, the actual contact pad that we've been theorizing was the cause of drift this whole time keeps having damage done to it and the damage is because there's a mechanical flaw in the actual design. Nintendo has responded to this because this is a governing body saying this so Nintendo isn't going to ignore it. And they said the percentage of Joy-Con controllers that have been reported as experiencing issues with the analog stick in the past is small and we have been making continuous improvements to the Joy-Con analog stick since its launch in 2017. They notably said they had a fundamental change somewhere around the time Switch OLED came out. I can confirm that I haven't had my OLED Joy-Con drift yet. I've had two sets of them. One of them, the controls they actually broke. It could have been my kids that did that. So that's not a drift issue. But my other set that's like a daily driver hasn't drifted yet. And so take that for what it will. Other Joy-Cons I've had drift really under pretty light use conditions. But so maybe there is some truth to this. Nintendo also said that we expect all our hardware to perform as designed. And if anything falls short of this goal, we always encourage consumers to contact Nintendo customer support who'll be happy to openly and leniently resolve any consumer issues related to the Joy-Con controllers, analog sticks, including in cases where the warranty may no longer apply. This is interesting because they've been doing this in the United States for a while, but other territories sometimes they'll deny your Joy-Con claim. So maybe now that this report came out in the UK and Nintendo's like, hey, we know. Okay, like they're not even denying the Joy-Con drift a thing. They're trying to act like it affects a small percentage of controllers, but they did note they use the very key language in there reported as experience. Meaning that there could be a ton of people experiencing drift that just aren't saying anything, just buying new controllers, just stop playing altogether. Nintendo's aware that this is a problem. They just aren't sure how widespread it is since they don't have, there's 100 plus a million of these out there, 200 million plus Joy-Cons. It's not like they have 100 million people claiming drift. So for them, their percentage numbers on the actual repairs probably look tiny in comparison to the total sales of Switch. That might be where they're getting those figures from, but either way, Nintendo is acknowledging that Joy-Con drift exists. They are acknowledging that this lab test is valid and that they're trying to always improve things. So take that for what it will. I have no idea. If you have a Switch OLED, have your Joy-Con started drifting yet? Because last we checked when we took apart the stick, it looks like it's the same design. So I can't imagine that it's gotten better, but maybe they're using a stronger metal as an example, because I didn't test metal composition, so that little contact pad could be using a stronger metal, which is much harder to damage. Maybe that's a change of the, maybe they changed the grade of the plastics and stuff, so maybe they're a bit softer and less likely to scratch. I have no idea what Nintendo has done. Only Nintendo and the manufacturers truly know, but, and our final little bonus story today comes from Digital Foundry's John Lineman. They did a Digital Foundry Direct Weekly. Again, they do this every single week where they go over a whole bunch of tech stuff from video games all the way to PC components and everything in between. And he brought up something that is very interesting when it comes to Switch Pro or a next generation Switch. What is Nintendo doing? So here's what he said, and I quote, "'So I think at one point internally, "'from what I can understand "'from talking to different developers "'is that there was some sort of mid-generation Switch "'update planned at one point, "'and that seems to no longer be happening. "'And thus it's pretty clear "'that whatever they do next "'is going to be an actual next generation hardware.'" Now, when reading that statement, it's important to understand what the facts are and what the opinions are. The facts are that he has talked to a bunch of different developers and that those developers did know that there was going to be a mid-generation Switch update. It also seems like those developers haven't heard anything from Nintendo on this update in some time, suggesting that it's been canned and thus his opinion is that whatever Nintendo is doing next is going to be next generation hardware. This isn't what his developer said. His developer sources didn't tell him, oh, Nintendo's next thing's going to be next generation hardware. They told him that, hey, we know that this was going to be a thing, not so sure now. Hey, you do with that, what you will. And John Lemon gave his professional opinion. So take that for what you will. There's going to be a lot of headlines out there about this. It doesn't really tell us anything if we're completely honest. It doesn't give us any more information other than, hey, somebody, some developers talked about Switch Pro lately and I guess the opinion is it's not going to come out. But who knows? Anyway, folks, you guys, let me know what you think about all these stories down in the comments below. I am Nathan Robodance from Nintendo Prime. I hope you really enjoyed this video. If you did, I would appreciate if you drop a like and subscribe to the channel for more Nintendo news, Nintendo facts from our shorts and more Zelda goodness. I have a Zelda video still dropping later today as well. We're going to be diving into is tears of the kingdom going to be the darkest Zelda yet? Why? Or why not? Well, I'm going to get into this because Adrianoma himself opened his mouth. All right, guys, we'll catch you later. Bye.