Nintendo’s First Season Pass and What It Means for the Industry

As with most things as of late, Nintendo seems to be the shy kid who dips his toe in the pool hours after the other children have already cannon-balled in and are splashing about. This fact isn’t a bad thing, however, as it meant that Nintendo avoided such treachery as the season-pass concept. Until now, it seems.

As I couldn’t be bothered to find a picture, a brief summary of the situation is that Nintendo is including a season pass in their upcoming Mario Golf game.

Now, if there’s any corporation I trust to not completely abuse the season pass concept, it’s Nintendo. I may not be a huge fan of them, but I respect them as a gaming company and expect that they’ll do right by consumers; whereas with EA and Ubisoft I expect season passes to be the figurative stick up the average idiot consumer’s bum. Nintendo fans and Nintendo as a company, however, expect a lot from their games and I doubt they’ll go the cheap cash-grab way with their season passes. Hell, they’ve even lowered the cost of the base game to compensate for this experiment of theirs, which deserves massive props.

Still, the lingering feeling from all of this is that no one in the gaming industry seems to be devoid of the desire to at least toy with the fantasy of completely screwing over their loyal consumers with strings of overpriced DLC content released far after the game initially sparkled on store shelves. In short, I think the last pure sect of the industry just caught the virus that EA and Ubisoft have been contagiously waving around for the past few years.