Everyone defending Nintendo in here for their online subscription fees are actually the mildly infuriating part for me personally. I’m a game developer and once attempted to develop an online game on Switch and other consoles. It was surprising to me to learn that exactly zero of the profits they rake in from their player base goes towards providing any server architecture whatsoever for can developers on the platforms to use. This means that all costs associated with hosting savers for online functionality of games on the platform are the responsibility of each developer. So I fail to see what service they are providing apart from enabling players to access the Internet on a device they already paid for. I really don’t think players understand this. I also think it’s important to point out that it’s at least twice as difficult to get a game through Nintendo Lotcheck aka certification if you have any online features whatsoever due to their extreme requirements, which ends up costing a lot more development time. Steam on the other hand has an almost non existent certification process and charges players nothing to access the Internet.
I will end my rant with one more important point. I had my switch stolen a while back. I had been playing Animal Crossing for years, all through the pandemic and had a very nicely curated island and house. I had been paying for Nintendo Online monthly and had my island backed up. However I didn’t purchase a new switch right away due to financial reasons and speed thought it foolish to keep paying my Nintendo Online membership so I canceled. After about 2 years I saw they announced a new update and finally had some extra money so I found a used Switch online. To my dismay, even though I reactivated my Nintendo Online subscription, Nintendo deleted my entire cloud save data repository for all my games, including Animal Crossing due to having not paid in over 12 months. This is unacceptable. Steam has not charged me a penny for online cloud service in all my years of having an account which started back on in the days of CS1.6. They have every save data file for every game I’ve ever played with zero threat of deletion. I cannot believe Nintendo thinks they were justified in deleting my data. I had to start Animal Crossing over from scratch. Needless to say I will not be subscribing to Nintendo Online ever again. Do not trust them with your data.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 3 days ago
Also, Steam being open means you can also use an app like Ludusavi to make your own savegame backups, just in case.
donk@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Steam is not open. It is literally DRM.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 2 days ago
It’s very light DRM and it doesn’t lock the majority of game files nor the save files. You can freely back up the save files and it’s very easy to pirate the games. What stops people from doing that is because it’s much more convenient to have Steam manage them. Valve has always been all about convenience not the DRM.
donk@lemmy.world 2 days ago
That’s what Valve says, yes, but those are the virtues of PC, an open platform, not Steam - which is just a storefront and license provisioning service. PC games have portable game files by default, Steam implements one way to manage them. It is worth making the distinction, especially in a thread where the discussion is about what owning hardware means in a service-driven world.