Nintendo Explains Why The Legend of Zelda Will have a Season Pass

Despite the fact it’s 2017 and Nintendo hasn’t been living under a rock to the best of my knowledge, they’re still pretty new to this whole “online gaming” thing. The Nintendo Switch will be the first Nintendo Console to have a online subscription fee, despite the fact that Microsoft and Sony did that particular adventure way earlier in their lifespans, and even though Nintendo’s certainly no stranger to DLC, it certainly is new to the whole concept of a season pass—the often-reviled practice of bundling future DLC packs together and selling them early.

But with the reveal that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild would have a season pass, a lot of players felt a little betrayed: after all, one of the reasons Nintendo is still loved, somehow, is that it bucks games industry norms (for better or for worse) and matches to its own drum. Nintendo acting more like other developers wasn’t on the top of anyone’s wish list, and now the big N feels it has to defend its choice to release two separate DLC packs for their future Zelda game.

Speaking with IGN, Nintendo's Senior Product Marketing Manager Bill Trinen had this to say:

"It was tough, because we actually had a lot of debate in terms of do we announce it, how do we announce it. I think one of the things that's unique about the way Nintendo develops games is when we're working on a game, and certainly just knowing the history of Nintendo games, you guys know that it's essentially we use every last minute to make the game as good as we possibly can, and really what that means is that the dev team was working on the main game, finished the main game, and as they're starting to get to the very end and wrap it up, really they said, 'You know we've made this massive world of Hyrule, we've spent a long time building it. It would be a waste to just make one game and have that be it,'"

“We want people to be able to enjoy exploring this world, and so they started thinking about, 'Well, if we were going to do DLC, what would we do, how would we do it?' And you can see that in the fact that it's not... the DLC is not launching the day after the game or the week after. It's coming out several months later in the form of the first pack and then several months after that in the form of the second pack. And that's because the content is in development."

It kind of reminds me of the arguments people were making when this kind of DLC was first becoming commonplace. Did I just step into a time machine?

Regardless, it is what it is. You know it won’t stop Nintendo fans from buying it on the spot.