Mario Maker: Taken too soon?

 Dearly Beloved;

It's no great striking of the established foundation of reality to opine that Nintendo have a real lack-lustre approach to matching the practises of their more modern industry contemporaries. I suspect part of that delineates from the inherent sense-of-superiority dripping from a games industry prominence that eclipses all of their competitors from the time, nudging the old dinosaur into believing they don't need to match the new watch, they've been right before and they'll always be right. Another part may come from the desire to seem apart from the rules and standards that other developers and publishers live by, allowing Nintendo to happily go about their machinations outside of generally accepted rules of business (like deprecation over time) without adequate judgement. But I think that this quixotic egoism has proven as much a detriment to their model as it has a 'freeing of the shackles', and no where has this proven more true than the manner in which Nintendo has grasped the 'Live service' model.

Live Service began as a promise. One made from former Halo Devs to their new fans, that their new game 'Destiny' would persist for a decade. (I'm sure there's some errant example of a 'Live Service'-style initiative within the industry beforehand, but Destiny was where the spark was lit for the rest of the world.) Of course a single game cannot have such a shelf life, and so Bungie would need to supply the game with content, new events, reasons to visit day-after-day and grind away, as well as big events to whip up the entire community, all to keep the Destiny lights on. Over time that promise was broken, we were lightly gas-lighted, but it was all to move Destiny onto the framework of Destiny 2: a game Bungie seem to riding towards that 10 year mark. (They've made it 5 with no signs of stopping.) So that is the baseline for what a 'Live Service' is; continuous renewal through developer support for as long as that game remains popular to its audience or the developers have a replacement readily to hand. It's a commitment.

Now the idea pretty much caught fire across the industry. Every developer and their mother crawled up from beneath the floorboards to grab their own room in the limited body this is the percentage of hardcore players willing to stick to a single game, or series, throughout eternity. It was always going to prove a struggle for this sub-genre, first to be seen and then to be established, because unlike with other types of games the 'Live Service' demanded so much from a finite spread of audience; as such many future attempts have fallen by the way side. Live Services that either didn't hit that initial fandom in order to justify being supported by the developers, Live Services that fell off entirely to the point where making a sequel seems moot, and Live Services that weren't probably designed to host rapid content deployment in a fashion that such a style of game requires. So it is was some surprise that when Nintendo came to the party, fashionably late as per usual, they seemed to have a decent grasp on everything required.

Mario Maker 1, but more so 2, are great examples of the elements which make the ideal Live Service. They're fertile grounds from the get-go, hosting a forum for User Generated Content (USG) backed by one of gaming's most beloved mascot franchises. Their very nature contained endless potential for new content to be introduced by the fanbase through their sheer creative talent, almost nullifying the need for developer support whatsoever. And Mario Maker 2 came in with regular substantive updates to the tool suites that users had access to, allowing for whole new combinations of USG and providing endless more content to be created with every single update. It seemed that 2019's Mario Maker 2 was the perfect fertile ground for endless 'Live Service' growth, maybe with some DLC chucked in down the line in order to provide some recurrent payment for Nintendo and justify continuing, for the rest of time. Or at least a good decade. It was dead before the end of 2020.

Why? How? Who let this happen? Because Nintendo stopped providing updates out of nowhere, and no replacements being in the works, fans have been left with their hands up wondering why it is Nintendo seem so adverse to seizing upon one of the best opportunities in their history. Mario Maker's updates had, up until then, shown so much potential! You had the update which bought Link into the game as an upgrade for Mario who came complete with his own suite of moves and interactions with the game mechanics, essentially remastering every possible USG map combination in the game. You had a competitive championship mode introduced where players could speedrun Nintendo designed courses against the wider world. You have a whole 'World Maker' mode introduced where players could essentially plan out an entire Mario game worth of levels and theme it however they so wanted. And then the game went inexplicably dark.

Both of those major updates were huge teases that any other developer could have rode for the next 5 years alone. A new character system which could introduce meaningful gameplay switch-ups? They could have worked off of Smash Bros Ultimate's model and charged for DLC characters who would unlock an entire suite of content through their inclusion. A World creator mechanic? That could be supplemented with touch-ups and reworks, and maybe even reimaginings of themes to match the DLC characters! I'm getting a little wacky with these ideas but this is how you need to get if you're going to make a successful Live Service with legs on it. You need to know how to stretch onwards to eternity with promise and gusto in your wake! But Nintendo didn't do that, they shut the whole thing down seemingly out of the blue.

Earlier I bought up monetisation, and I haven't harped on about it out of the blue. Though we've never been told, I maintain that monetisation is the reason that Mario Maker 2 was taken from us as it ultimately proved to be a nut that Nintendo couldn't crack. Because Mario Maker was a single purchase game. Buy once and you get access to endless USG; but at no point does that provide a viable excuse for active development to be maintained. Although Nintendo has more than enough resources to build a team capable of doing so, without a monetary incentive to maintain Mario Maker there was no way the team could justify doing it. My idea of DLC characters runs into the problem that it'll introduce frustrating walls between players and USG generators that would be sure to hurt player retention. Of course, the default move in such a stalemate is to just tack on a harmless cosmetic store, but I think we already established that Nintendo have an aversion to borrowing totally viable and workable modern industry solutions.

And so we ended up with a dead Mario Maker. A perfect framework which could have been advantaged during the pandemic, left to rot and fester as other Live Services with much shorter legs enjoyed several years of work. Marvel's Avengers is still receiving updates two years on and there were people announcing how vapid that game was at launch! Anthem may have entered hibernation early, but there were people holding out hope for that game to pull through for actual years of no content. League of Legends is building an empire out it's single Live Service origins simply because they stuck to their guns and kept growing their playerbase. Mario Maker could have been the pedestal for the next 2D main Mario game to be released in a manner as close as Nintendo will ever get to 'open source' without sacrificing their control of the IP. It could have revolutionised platforming forever as a whole new game of gimmicks, tricks and content is reworked and reimagined just as soon as it's introduced. It would have challenged the community and the developers in a meeting of creative wit never matched before in the gaming medium. But alas, it was dropped. And so we mourn, here today. For another prime and tantalising opportunity snuffed before it's time.