I hang out a discord run by SwitchStars, who does what I do, bring notice to the shit on the Nintendo E-Shop. He made an interesting point: I bring up scam publisher Midnight Works a lot, in many many reviews, including the Radio Cars review from Monday. I got to thinking, why do I do that? Why do I constantly bring them, and their related companies, up in reviews. Well first, I review a lot of their scam titles, I count thirty-nine at present between Midnight Works, VG Games, Instamarketing and Game, Dezvolt Games, Gogame Console Publishers and Gametotop Corp. Now not all of these are directly owned by Midnight Works, but they are all linked according to SwitchStars. Midnight Works is the most visible and biggest of them all, so when I say their name, I’m talking about these six publishers combined. Besides, if you go their page, many of the games listed are under a different publisher on the E-Shop. For example, Skateboard Drifting with Maxwell Cat is listed on their page, but is published by Gametotop! Hooligan Simulator was under Dezvolt Games!
But it goes deeper, Midnight Works has helped cause the Nintendo E-Shop to go to shit. While they are not they only culprit, which I’ll get to, they’re a big piece of the puzzle.
The Midnight Works Effect
How do you know its a Midnight Works title? Simple. If it looks like a scam, it probably is. These games used to have long titles of random words to show up in Search results, though they’ve been shortening them lately as not to automatically stand out as a scam. Still, remember Burnout, they can be misleading nevertheless. Next, the screenshots are always lying. Take a look at the The Love comparison again, as its striking. The left screenshot is the advertising screenshot, the right screenshot is the actual game.
Its not even just the screenshots that are lying, the the E-shop descriptions for Midnight Works titles are always lying. Take The Love again:
Dynamic Conversations: Experience ever-changing conversations with an adaptable chatbot system. Your choices shape each chat, creating a fresh adventure every time.
Bullshit!
None of what they describe is ever fully in the game.
However, the main problem isn’t the lies, its that there are so damn many of them, They clog up the e-shop, pushing legitimate Nindies out of the way! Currently standing at 127 games, with two or three seeming to release weekly and those are just ones with the publishers listed! They are literally choking the E-Shop to death. But they are not the only ones, by far.
Red.Deer Games scam!
RedDeer.Games is also a scam publisher, but they do publish legitimate games, just go on their twitter to see them. The recently released One Night Burlesque(which I’ll review at a later date) is one of them. The scam comes with what they don’t talk about on their twitter, releasing the same damn game over and over again with minute differences between them. Type in AAA Clock to see what I mean:
Midnight Works and Company aren’t even that shameless. Still, the same problem occurs, they choke out the legitimate titles on the new release page with the same games every few days or weeks.
Conclusion
But wait… there’s even more scams! Take a look at the screen of new releases:
How much crap is on the page? Well, there’s Real Car Parking 2024, which is basically an asset flip of the same style game over and over under a variety of publisher names(see: Truck Simulator 2 for example). There’s Internet Cafe Mini Games, which I’ve covered. There’s ATV Monster Racing by Success Games, a seventh Midnight Works outfit i forgot existed! Then at the bottom there’s a game by Troooze, World War D-Day, who is always awful. Next to it is a game for kids that looks very suspicious, and considering Switch Scores labels it as low quality it probably is a scam too. Note, I’m not counting The Great Battle of Shark Monkey by Game Nacional(of Rafa’s World infamy), that’s on my to-review list and isn’t half bad.
So what can we learn? At least 5 scam games on that list. Clogging out the legitimate titles. And there’s the issue in a nutshell. They’re right there for you too see, and Nintendo doesn’t even screen them out. They don’t care, they make money off every sale. At least Steam puts in a minimal effort to screen out the crap via various methods like allowing filtered searches and allowing refunds. Nintendo does not have the level of filtering that Steam has, nor allows refunds. Therefore, It is a scam game bonanza on the Nintendo E-Shop. And in the end, publishers like Midnight Work couldn’t function if Nintendo allowed refunds. And so, we all suffer, and I have a hobby.
