And yet they've been antagonistic towards the modding/piracy community since the beginning and have one of the most loyal fan bases of any gaming brand. How do you explain that?
(1) Your average Nintendo gamer isn't into the modding scene whatsoever; they just want to play the latest version of Mario Kart.
(2) Their games really are good. So good people will bend over backwards to mod them (or, in the case of older titles, even just play them), despite the challenges. Particularly for games they grew up on.
It's not a mod, per se (and to some extent it's tacitly tolerated by Nintendo), but the Pokemon Showdown[1] battle simulator is one of my favorite examples of a fan-made gaming project.
Competitive Pokemon follows a couple different formats: there's the official Nintendo-sponsored format, known as VGC, which is played on physical game cartridges and uses rules set by Nintendo itself; and then there's Smogon, which is a community-led format with dozens of different metagames and tiers. Players (usually) vote on rules and bans in any given format, and games themselves are played on Pokemon Showdown's browser-based battle simulator.
What makes this so cool is that Pokemon Showdown is a 1:1 replica of how player-vs-player battles function on physical game cartridges—including random glitches and quirks from earlier generations. (Gen 1 Hyper Beam, anyone?) Nintendo hasn't brought down the hammer because Pokemon Showdown is no replacement for actually playing a full-blown Pokemon game, but it's an amazing way to preserve competitive formats from generations past. The DS and 3DS may be dead, but BW OU's weather wars live on...
Because their games are better and more timeless than others. Going back to a nintendo game from 20 years ago is fun and rewarding, going back to a 20 year old game from EA or whoever is a miserable experience
The fanbase skips generations of products so it's not as loyal as it seems. The wii-u never hit critical mass for example. Price over highend quality, quantity of games available wins the day for nintendo. Each time I've picked up a nintendo product I do it because it's the cheapest and has the most games. Original vs sega master system, genasis vs super nintendo, wii over microsoft's surface
It's basically the Disney business model, still mining nostalgic brands from 40 years ago. As a parent I was lucky that I didn't have that nostalgia factor to make me push it onto my kids. I got a Switch based on their "family friendly" reputation, saw how scummy they are with re-releases, random subscription fees, and periodically locking down old games on their emulator, and decided I didn't want to make my kid become nostalgic to that corporate abuse in their future. That's at least one generational nostalgia chain cutoff, but there are many million others out there.
