Nintendo are basically the only people who held out against in game spending, for which I salute them.

I spent a few years in and around the industry and there was so much insanity around the need for in game monetization that it just made things much worse.

And because the game studios didn't care about it, none of the money stuff worked, making executives even more upset.

All to catch some vision of F2P money which is an entirely different business that these companies couldn't possibly support.

It's very sad for the industry overall (this particular decision is MS killing stuff off because the margins aren't good enough to funnel more cash into GPU gods).

Nintendp dabbled briefly with it. But they know their audience and very much did not want to risk any PR hit by associating too closely with the typical gacha/lootbox model. They saw the Roblox/Fortnite smoke long before most of the industry and turned off very quickly.

But there's one specific statistic to why Nintendo can keep doing what it does in a way no one else can: 98% retention rate. You get into Nintendo and you basically never leave. Even for Japan, that's well above the 70% retention rate you'd expect. Keeping that kind of institutional knowledge for an entire career makes them really good at what they do, and the unfortunate decades of Japan's economy meant they were less tempted by amassing huge loans or risks on experimental stuff.

Maybe they didn't become trillionaires, but it means they amassed a huge war chest and can weather storms that US companies are currently in the middle of.