The Corporation Asks Only Whether We Came Back

I sold my Nintendo Switch 2, and I have to admit that it put me in my feelings.

I love Nintendo. I did not simply grow up playing its games. In some ways, I grew up alongside the company. Nintendo helped teach me what play could be: colorful, strange, inviting, and occasionally magical. Its best games did not just entertain me. They made the world feel larger. They made me curious about what might be behind the next door, beneath the next pipe, or just beyond the edge of the screen.

Selling the system felt like admitting that somewhere along the way, Nintendo left me behind.

Maybe I changed. Of course I did. But that is not the entire story. Nintendo changed too—or perhaps it became increasingly committed to not changing. It learned how valuable our affection was and how reliably it could sell that affection back to us.

The same characters return. The same structures return. The same games are repackaged, remastered, reissued, and resold. Prices rise. Access becomes more controlled. Hardware creates another reason to purchase versions of experiences we have already purchased before. Nintendo remains capable of making beautiful, joyful worlds, but it is also one of the most conservative companies in entertainment.

Then, bizarrely, it will become technologically reckless. It will become fascinated with a new interface, a sensor, a screen, or a control method and present it as the future. Sometimes that produces something genuinely transformative. Sometimes it gives us the announced-and-abandoned Vitality Sensor or motion-control ideas that feel revolutionary for a moment and strangely underdeveloped afterward. Nintendo can take enormous creative risks with the way we interact with a game while taking very few risks with what the game itself is allowed to become.

I am tired of getting excited for a game only to discover a half-finished mess. I am tired of filler masquerading as value. I am tired of games that either hold my hand through every step or drop me into oversized worlds and call aimless wandering freedom. I am tired of paying more for experiences that seem increasingly designed by a negotiation among marketing departments, engagement metrics, licensing agreements, and quarterly expectations.

But this is not really an essay about Nintendo.

Nintendo is simply where I felt it.

Bigger Is a Tool, Not a Virtue

We have confused making things bigger with making them better.

There are good things about scale. Scale can lower costs, broaden access, distribute medicine, connect isolated people, and place libraries of human knowledge inside our pockets. I am not arguing that everything should be small, local, handmade, or technologically primitive. I love technology. I love what human beings can build together when our intelligence, labor, and imagination are organized toward a meaningful purpose.

But size is a tool. It is not a virtue.

Once growth becomes the purpose of an institution rather than a tool it uses, the institution begins consuming the very thing that made it valuable. Quality becomes an expense. Workers become units of productivity. Customers become users, subscribers, demographics, data points, and recurring revenue. Whatever cannot be measured begins to look inefficient, even when it is the entire reason people cared in the first place.

A game no longer needs to be memorable. It needs to retain players.

A movie does not need to say anything. It needs to sustain a franchise.

A school does not need to educate this particular human being. It needs to demonstrate outcomes across thousands of them.

A hospital does not have patients. It has throughput.

The larger these systems become, the less capable they seem of saying that something might already be enough. There must always be another sequel, another subscription tier, another acquisition, another price increase, and another reason that what we already bought is no longer sufficient. Growth no longer serves the work. The work exists to serve growth.

Disney has done this to movies. EA has done it to football and soccer. Familiar stories and annualized products are safer than unfamiliar ideas, so affection becomes an asset to be managed. Corporations do not have to create a new relationship with us when they can continue extracting value from an old one.

A World Too Expensive to Explore

The new Wolverine game is another version of the same problem. Long before its release, stolen development materials gave the public an uninvited look at what Insomniac was building. Those materials came from a ransomware attack that also exposed employees’ personal information, and the press was right not to treat unfinished, stolen work as a finished product deserving review.

But the eventual shape of the game was hardly unimaginable: another enormously expensive, tightly controlled trip through a valuable intellectual property. It is a roughly twenty-hour, largely linear experience that has been criticized for excessive guidance, limited exploration, and little reason to return once the tour is over.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a twenty-hour game. Some of the greatest games ever made are shorter and more linear than that. In fact, condemning a game merely for being short would reproduce the same mistake I am criticizing—the belief that more automatically means better. I would rather play twelve unforgettable hours than eighty hours of chores.

The problem is not the number of hours. It is what fills them. There is a difference between a focused experience created with restraint and a controlled experience created from fear: fear that the player might become lost, miss some content, fail to understand the objective, or stop moving through the product at the intended speed.

That may be the central contradiction of modern entertainment. Corporations spend unprecedented amounts of money constructing enormous imaginary worlds and then refuse to trust us to inhabit them.

The worlds become larger while the possible experience of them becomes smaller.

The gaming press is willing to argue loudly about artificial intelligence, often treating it as the singular great threat to creativity. Some of that criticism is deserved. AI raises real questions about consent, labor, ownership, attribution, and what happens when powerful companies use new tools primarily to eliminate workers and reduce costs.

But AI did not teach these companies to value efficiency over imagination. It did not invent mass layoffs after profitable releases. It did not invent endless sequels, focus-tested stories, predatory monetization, day-one patches, annualized franchises, or the belief that every successful idea must become a universe.

AI entered a culture that had already decided creativity was primarily a product.

When commentators blame the machine without examining the institution directing it, they risk giving that institution an excuse. The tool may accelerate the damage, but the value system was already here. We cannot understand the corporatization of creativity if we begin the story with AI.

GTA VI may become a cultural event. It may sell an astonishing number of copies and remind millions of people why games can still matter. But one game cannot carry an industry whose underlying incentives are broken. A spectacular success may even encourage publishers to chase larger budgets, longer development cycles, safer properties, and more impossible expectations.

No individual masterpiece can repair a system that mistakes spectacle for health.

The Broken Bargain of Fast Food

This process is easier to see when we leave entertainment behind.

Fast food once offered an understandable bargain. The food would not be exceptional, but it would be inexpensive, predictable, and fast. McDonald’s could give a family essentially the same meal in Greenville, Atlanta, Chicago, or almost anywhere else. Standardization created real convenience, and scale made that convenience broadly available.

But corporations are rarely satisfied with fulfilling the original bargain. They must keep extracting more from it.

The food remains standardized. The service becomes more automated and less personal. The customer performs more of the labor through kiosks and apps. The employees who remain are asked to manage a physical counter, a drive-through, delivery orders, and a stream of digital tickets while every second is measured. Meanwhile, the prices rise until the experience no longer feels especially cheap—and it is not always especially fast.

McDonald’s still sells an enormous amount of food. That does not mean people feel good about the experience. The company is now emphasizing value, hospitality, simpler operations, and even improvements to the taste of its core food. In other words, it is trying to restore the qualities that years of optimization helped weaken.

Starbucks offers an even clearer example because coffee was never the whole product. Starbucks sold ritual and atmosphere. It promised a third place between home and work: somewhere to sit, read, meet someone, write, or simply exist in public for a while.

Then the café gradually became a fulfillment center.

Mobile orders accumulated on counters. Employees became production workers trying to satisfy an invisible line of customers who might not even be in the building yet. People standing inside the store became names on adhesive labels. Seating disappeared from some locations. Efficiency increased while the experience that had made the company meaningful deteriorated.

Now Starbucks is spending heavily on a “Back to Starbucks” strategy: more staffing, shorter waits, simplified menus, redesigned stores, and a renewed emphasis on human connection. The turnaround may be working, and sales have recently improved. But the very need for the turnaround reveals the problem. The company spent years engineering humanity out of the experience and is now investing enormous sums to reinstall it.

That may be the perfect expression of corporatization: first eliminate the difficult-to-measure human element, then discover that its absence has made the product worse, and finally reintroduce an imitation of it as a new corporate initiative.

Nintendo sells childhood, discovery, and play.

McDonald’s sells familiarity, family ritual, and convenience.

Starbucks sells personal ritual and a place to belong.

None of these companies sells only a product. Each occupies a place in people’s lives. Each inherited decades of affection and trust. Corporatization converts that inheritance into something extractable, and continued purchasing is interpreted as proof that nothing important has been lost.

The corporation asks only whether we came back, not whether we were glad we did.

Making Something Worth Maintaining

What I want is not a world without large companies, ambition, profit, technology, or growth. I am not asking us to return to an imaginary past when every meal was delicious, every game arrived complete, and every business cared deeply about its customers. That world never existed.

I want us to stop treating efficiency as the highest human good.

I want a recommitment to quality. I want us to take time, follow the process, invest in people, and build things intended to last. I want institutions capable of deciding that something is already large enough and that the next task is not expansion but care.

That requires maintenance, which is less glamorous than disruption and more necessary. Maintenance does not produce an endless series of launch events. It means preserving what works, repairing what does not, listening to the people who actually use a thing, and accepting responsibility for what we have already built.

Quality often looks inefficient while it is being created. It requires judgment that cannot always be reduced to a metric. It requires experimentation that may fail, workers who are not exhausted, customers who are trusted, and enough patience for an idea to become more than content.

We should ask different questions.

Not merely: How many units did it sell?

Did we make something worthy of another person’s time?

Not merely: How quickly did we serve it?

Was it good, and did we treat the people making and receiving it like human beings?

Not merely: Can we make it larger?

Can we care for it? Can we sustain it? Can we make it better without stripping away the reason it mattered?

Selling my Switch 2 affected me because Nintendo once represented that kind of care. Its best games felt deliberately made. They were playful without being disposable, accessible without treating the player like an idiot, and strange without needing to justify every bit of strangeness to a quarterly earnings call.

I still love that Nintendo. I still love games. I still believe technology can open new forms of imagination rather than closing them down.

I sold the system because I am tired of paying corporations to sell pieces of my own affection back to me. I am tired of subsidizing the hope that the next purchase will restore a feeling the company has learned to reproduce cosmetically but not spiritually.

Maybe that sounds sentimental. It is sentimental. These companies became powerful precisely because they attached themselves to our memories, rituals, relationships, and hopes. We should not be embarrassed to grieve when those relationships change. But neither should our grief obligate us to keep buying.

I did not leave Nintendo because I stopped believing in wonder.

I left because wonder deserves better maintenance.