Nintendo’s most useful news, statistically speaking

PLUS: EA's studio shutdown and the cancellation of a Black Panther game extends two bleak industry trends.

Screenshot of a Nintendo Today post and its user ratings, captured by Game File

Not long ago, I realized that the world’s most successful video game company does something unusual with the “news” (their term) that it publishes to its smartphone app, Nintendo Today.

It lets users rate each article or video with one—and only one—of four qualities: Useful, Funny, Cool or Cute.

This results in a sort of emotional score for each post, revealing whether users tended to find an article more amusing, more helpful, etc.

Describing what Nintendo posts as “news” is accurate to the extent that Nintendo Today has largely distributed brief new details about the Switch 2, small glimpses of its games, rotating virtual mock-ups of Switch accessories and clips of people trying Switch 2 for the first time.

It’s all marketing, of course, even though they label it as news. More to the point, though, it’s marketing/news that is getting a user score.

For example, Nintendo Today’s April 3rd post about how to adjust the Switch 2’s stand was rated as follows:

• Useful 78%

• Funny 3%

• Cool 16%

• Cute 3%

An April 6th character spotlight of Donkey Kong introduces this “mild-mannered goofball who can usually be found jamming in the jungle with friends.” That post was rated by users:

• Useful 3%

• Funny 20%

• Cool 66%

• Cute 11%

Journalism is an economically troubled field, and while Nintendo Today’s output probably doesn’t qualify for a Pulitzer—its hardest-hitting content is about Donkey Kong Bananza’s punching controls—I was nonetheless intrigued by Nintendo’s experiment.

Perhaps what my industry is missing is the opportunity for its consumers to put an emotion score on each article. Could Nintendo have innovated in my very own line of work?

Also: I am physiologically incapable of skipping the chance to draw conclusions from obscure Nintendo data.

So I have spent crucial minutes of my recent days tapping on all 225 articles (many of them videos) published to Nintendo Today since the app’s March 27th launch. I have checked and tabulated the emotion scores for each piece.

And I now have some findings to share with you, starting with the revelation of which posts scored best in each of the four categories…