Well, between their incredibly abusive behaviour towards fans making content on YouTube even though that’s free advertising, the mess with the smash tournaments and them breaking agreements to side with some new band of assholes -

their previous efforts to destroy companies by patent trolling and their current efforts to undo Palworld that have pretty much only been prevented by them teaming up with Sony -

and their very heavy-handed protectionist approach to ROM preservation even though they keep taking away people’s access to their older catalogue, I certainly wouldn’t consider them ABOVE board.

Before sony’s completely ridiculous 2024 I would have firmly called them below-board, but enshittification really hit hard, jeez. (Dashes were for breathing pauses cus that was getting a little long. I was also going to mention an issue with them being a lot less transparent with whether or not they’d ethically sourced their rare earth metals vs the other big two, but I don’t remember quite when that was, just that it was discussed during the switch era).

Edit: tbc I still upvoted cus physical games ARE still important, but I forgot to mention that they don’t let you downpatch digital games so speed running, or even just wanting to play TotK with the dupe glitch, is forced to sometimes be way more expensive thanks to REQUIRING physical AND having to play offline forever cus I think it tries to force patches?

Also there’s a weird rectangle in the guy’s hands that doesn’t match the scene (paper? dollar bill?), the rolled up thing in the ledft corner is clearly a bastardization of a soda bottle and a rolled-up newspaper, and there’s some weird white chunk on the middle girl’s forehead that feels like it’s supposed to be a physical colouring error.

Tbf they say their main thing is Youtube with dual-streaming to twitch. I was looking them up and wondering why all their twitch vods were 5 years old lol

To clarify, sales figures don’t exist anymore because you have to count the people who take a $20 sub to ubisoft to play this instead of buying it.

do I have a zefrank for YOU: https://youtu.be/zFNnx4UgkNI