It's the latest trend in digital media, and its time for Nintendo to join the future of stupid accounting tricks.
We are neither attorneys nor certified financial planners. We're merely well-informed turbo-geniuses with a nose for doing business. Advice herein does not constitute certainty of outcome, all financial decisions come with risk. This risk includes ignoring these projections.
So you made a billion dollars selling Mario Kart Warriors, and now the National Tax Agency is looking for their cut.
Nintendo can deal with this windfall by removing an unmeasurably small portion of the wealth from their Scrooge McDuck-style vault, but Koei Tecmo likely doesn't have a lifeguard to oversee executives swimming in a pool filled entirely with gold coins.
It's time for these two partners to help each other out.
We need an offset. Grab your accountant and an architect, because we're about to build a new office and ascribe it to the budget of a single game.
Pictured: Shuntaro Furukawa.So here's the problem: streaming services are way ahead of those of us in the video game biz on this. They produced a glut of content to fill their then-nascent streaming services, attempting to grab a slice of the pie during the insatiable content appetite that came with the pandemic. Lately, they've been removing "underperforming" series and films from their services, effectively memory-holing multi-million dollar productions.
This is beyond what production studios used to do, when they would simply cancel a show. This is actual erasure - it is no longer available.
Look at this list:
- At Home With Amy Sedaris
- Close Enough
- Final Space
- Metalocalypse
- Space Ghost Coast to Coast
"A shark on whiskey is mighty risky; a shark on beer is a beer engineer"Why do they do this? Cost cutting and Write-downs.
If the show is still available to stream it can still "earn." It's not easy to track any given piece of content's contribution to revenue from these streaming services, but for tax purposes its immaterial. If you want to say the content is no longer generating revenue then just pull it!
Did a show "cost" you 20 million dollars to produce, and "generate" four million? That's a loss that you can use to offset your Mario Kart Warriors profits.
Pictured: Profits. Our enemy.We need a game that's disposable to load up with unrelated costs. Need to remodel the company café? Need new drawing tablets for the artists? Time to replace the AC system? Well, sounds to me like they're all part of the cost of making this game!
We also need a game that, if no longer available, wont harm the brand.
Arguably, any game is a game Nintendo might pull, they just killed two entire systems-worth of downloadable games, but we're here for more money. We cant wait 10 years to pull it down.
We need a guaranteed loser, and we cannot risk The Producers style hijinks here.
We need one leading character to ensure no one will buy this game: Mr. EAD.
Just imagine spending 90 hours looking at Mr. EAD's ass. The very thought is nauseating.
We need a bad game that, following its reveal in a Nintendo Direct, results in presenters Messrs. Koizumi and Takahashi looking visibly shaken. At no point should we telegraph that this game will make anyone happy for even one nanosecond.
How to make people hate this game
"A Rebirth of the F-Zero Series!"
I want this tagline to be the second thing the audience sees. First is a streak of light, perhaps the taillights of an F-Zero racecar zipping back in otherwise darkness. As it fades into the inky void, a familiar voice shouts out "Show me your moves!".
Pictured: The Hook.After a fade to black, the text "A Rebirth of the F-Zero Series" streaks into view. The hype for F-Zero is now sufficiently stoked. The franchise's eleven living fans are about to feel the hammer crashing down upon them.
That hammer is Warriors gameplay. A three minute trailer hyping up a "new vision" for F-Zero is interspersed with cuts of nothing but the blandest punching of masses of generic enemies. At the end, the logo "F-Zero Warrior: Bounty Racers." The stinger is a flirty Octoman winking, blowing an anime kiss (with floating heart) directly at the camera.
"ARA~ ARA~"People would be livid. Remember Metroid Prime: Federation Force? Even though that was clearly a spin-off, and there was never any implication that it would preclude other Metroid games, a subset of the audience lost their minds. Granted, there are less F-Zero fans still holding out hope, but this is far more weaponized. We are calling this a rebirth and a new direction. We are setting the hook, and now we just need to reel in the bad word of mouth.
Speaking of Metroid fans...
Let's piss off Metroid fans
Samus could easily exist in the F-Zero universe, so let's just go for it. This is a game about bounty hunting, right? "Leak" a rumor that Samus will be in the game, and then drop a trailer later that confirms it. Be absolutely certain that the trailer shows her consulting with Adam Malkovich before doing literally anything. Also, maybe have her show emotion at seeing the thing that killed her entire family. Metroid fans hate that.
Why are we pissing off fans of a completely unrelated series? Well, first it's easy. And fun. And they deserve it. But fourthly, they're excellent at creating bad word of mouth, and we want this game's reputation to be absolutely toxic.
Comments are OPEN!
Nintendo has a history of trailers getting ridiculously negative ratios on YouTube. However, likely bending to advertiser pressure, Google hid the thumbs up/down ratio, showing only the thumbs up count instead. The best we can do to memorialize the poor reaction is enable comments on the trailer. The trick is to turn them on and refuse to police them. Don't look, don't read, and certainly don't curate this ensured trough of torment. Let "journalists" of less repute than yours truly create free content... I mean listicles documenting the worst of the commentariat.
Give this caldron a month to get into a froth and then send a diver in to extract the most transparently sarcastic "positive" comments you can find. Use them to cut together the standard "accolades" trailer but project absolute sincerity. Pretend that you believed a person saying "I sold my PS5 and copy of Final Fantasy XVI to play this game." Feature their comment prominently in a parade of poisoned praise.
Leave the comments enabled on this video, as well. You may repeat this pattern as many times as you deem necessary, with each video ensuring new content for the next.
Star Fox is not spared
Everyone hated the idea of Star Fox Racing, even if it was never real. Well now here's James McCloud, the unpleasantly human-fox thing from F-Zero meeting the actual Fox McCloud. That's right, the entire Star Fox team is here. We can show that in the accolade trailer.
Nintendo's first "cinematic" universe is here! Where better than a Warriors game to introduce the fact that Metroid/F-Zero/Star Fox are in the same universe? Warriors games are all about weird canonical events. We will now have three fanbases absolutely irate.
A premium product for a premium price
This is not just a Warriors game. It's an F-Zero/Star Fox/Metroid game. We cannot be charging a mere $60 US for this kind of milestone. If Tears of the Kingdom is worth $70 then this must be too.
Also, Star Fox appears in game, but is only playable via Day-1 DLC. Again, think "premium product."
Premium. Product.Time for some accounting magic
In order for this game to be useful as a write-down it needs to lose a lot of money. But if we want to use it to commit what some might call "tax fraud" we need it to "lose" a lot of money.
What's the distinction implicit in the quotation marks? Actual loss versus booked loss.
Let's say we did such a good job making F-Zero Warrior: Bounty Racers unpalatable that we somehow manage to sell zero copies worldwide. Every Yen invested would go unrecouped. We could write-down the entire damn game. But, what did we gain? Sure, we set money on fire and we joined the current "delist your hard-made content" zeitgeist, but we didn't really save any money. We will spend more making the game then we will get in tax relief.
No, if we want to maximize our yield on this deliberately failed project, we need to roll in lots of other expenses that would likely have been attached to future projects that we intended to actually sell as serious products. Now we have assets sitting about that can be used, without cost, on future - winning - projects. And yet, all their costs were booked to this tax haven of a stinker.
Is this illegal? Probably.
Will you get caught? Who can say?
Let's look at the list of things in play:
- A new lag-free Warriors engine
- Modern art assets for Star Fox and Metroid
- Switch marketing campaigns that spend 99% of the time talking about the system and 1% on the game itself
- Legal expenses related to keeping the F-Zero trademarks up to date
- Future Smash Bros. art assets for Captain Falcon and crew
- New Metroid music to reuse in Prime 4
- New voice lines for future Smash games
- Improvements to CI/CD pipelines at Koei Tecmo
- Multiple business dinners
Tax law? That's for suckers without tax attorneys.
Do these kinds of deductions apply to Japanese companies? Unclear! After reading PricewaterhouseCoopers International's write-up on Japanese tax law it seems like it's just 10% of gross profit, so let's get that number down.
What's the gameplay like?
Who cares! Ultimately, we need to make this as virulently unappealing as possible, so it should be Captain Falcon saying his Smash one-liners with such consistency it makes pre-patch Xenoblade Chronicles 2 seem downright reserved. Where Mario Kart Warriors invested time and energy into adapting the racing format to the Warriors series, this game should do absolutely none of that. Punching and kicking across the map with nothing to recommend it beyond hearing "FALCON PAUNCH" 12,000 times an hour.
In conclusion...
I believe F-Zero Warrior: Bounty Racers is a key business opportunity to invest in numerous technology pipelines, artistic endeavors, and long term protection of company IP. I believe this product is so undesirable that us de-listing it would actually be met with a positive response: "they've realized their error and are changing course."
But, most importantly, it creates the necessary ballast to offset the massive potential of its predecessor, while still contributing - in its own circuitous way - to long-term successes. Lastly, as an aspiring media company, this selective delisting for economic reasons will be great for burnishing the credentials of Nintendo Pictures' management team as modern entertainment industry executives.
