I agree with your first statement, but disagree with the rest. I am not their target market. I enjoy playing their games, but primarily because I am spending time with the kids as I do. Not many of their games are targeted to my demographic.

I disagree that they focus only on digital. Every single Nintendo game comes out on a physical chip. And sales on digital copies are rare and minor (30% off maybe). It is often cheaper to get a physical copy on sale cheaper than digital. And you can then sell it / buy it second-hand. I’ve read that with Switch 2, even the digital codes can be transferred to a new owner. Nintendo for all their faults have never forced you to lock in a digital library you can never resell.

I bought it second hand. Nintendo got $0 from the sale. In fact, two thirds of our physical games have been purchased second hand.

You might be surprised. I came to the Switch party super late when I bought my kid a switch Christmas 2023. He’s all over Zelda now, has BotW, TotK and even Skyward Sword on his Switch. For him, these games are all from the last year. He turned 2 the year BotW was released.

It’ll be the same story with Switch 2. Some kid who might not even be born yet will get a Switch 2 in 8-9 years and come across these games with all his school friends.

I doubt I’ll go the Switch 2 path with the kids. I haven’t seen a reason to upgrade, yet. I’m thinking of the Steam Deck - while the Nintendo had a fairly cheap entry point to get on the platform, I’ve spent enough on games to negate the difference between a Switch and a Steam Deck - where I already have a 500+ game library to play on it.

So I’ve just bought a PC. I haven’t had a new computer for 12 years. The newest game I’ve played is Subnautica (and Below Zero). I’ve basically missed everything from the last 15 years.

I own a few games that I haven’t been able to play until now (Fallout 4, Star Wars Squadrons, Witcher 3, few others). Thinking I probably have enough games in my backlog to play those and maybe look at new stuff next sale.

You might like Civ IV, it’s square tiled instead of hexagon tiles. I’ve always preferred the squares.

They have Egosoft and their X universe games. Epic sandbox galactic games. I love my X3 empires.

The horse speed on the other hand is awful. There’s a mod called “faster horses” though that addresses it.

Not recommended for fathers - particularly fathers of boys.

You missed the very end when the dad finds out that his son basically died to save him. As a dad with two sons, this would break me. Leave me to die, boys. That’s not a trade I’d ever make.

I think this is the reply that prompted me to reply at the top of the post. Does your edit mean I was of some help? You appear to have the right of it, yes.

As to your second question: what mod loadout a player has will have zero bearing on another’s experience. If one were to use the mod, others would not be affected.

To confused people exploring from all Communities trying to understand what the hell is going on:

• Bethesda is a game studio who does a decent job of giving people choice to do/be whatever they want in their games. Out of the box they included the option to choose your pronouns in a new game called “Starfield”.
• They also make it possible to modify their games to make very drastic changes to the player experience.
• Nexus is a site that hosts thousands of mods to all sorts of games. People make mods, upload them to Nexus and players download them.
• Someone made a mod to remove the option to choose pronouns from Starfield.
• Nexus decided they don’t want to host this mod. It’s hurtful to people and goes against their values of inclusivity.

That’s about it. Most of the people whinging about censorship don’t even play the game. They’re just here to whinge about how the world is moving on from old bigoted ways and they want to stay in the past and be jerks to people for merely existing. If they actually cared, they’d just download the mod from some other site. The mod itself is probably not much bigger than this reply.

Steam Deck not available in my country. Tragically.

I’m sporadic with my gaming. Couple hours here, few hours there. It’s a style of gameplay that has never lent itself to MMOPRGs. I neither commit enough time, nor do I really control when I’ll have that time. I can’t commit with a guild to a raid at x’oclock on Tuesday to take on that dungeon.

I’ve loved Skyrim though. Can you solo-play Elder Scrolls online and have a good time?