Death Stranding is making its way to the PS4 on November 8, and alongside it will launch a limited edition PS4 Pro bundle with an exclusive console design.
You can check out that limited edition PS4 Pro in the video unboxing above, in which Max Scoville and I show off the Death Stranding-themed PS4 Pro as well as the limited edition orange translucent DualShock 4 controller.
You can check out IGN’s Death Stranding preorder guide to find out where the PS4 Pro special edition may still be available, as well as which other versions of the game you can preorder ahead of its launch.
After the past three years of cryptic and confusing teaser trailers, the question on everyone’s lips has been, “What exactly is Death Stranding?” Well, now we know, and the answer is… complicated. The first game from famed designer Hideo Kojima since his dramatic departure from publisher Konami and his long-running Metal Gear franchise is a boldly inventive slab of sci-fi, fastidiously crafted to host to some of the most breathtaking sights I’ve ever witnessed in any medium – video game or otherwise. It’s also a cross-country crawl that frequently finds itself mired in an exhausting amount of inventory management, backtracking, one-note mission design, and unprecedentedly arduous travel. It’s evident that Kojima and his team at Kojima Productions have worked extremely hard to build Death Stranding, but it’s also painfully clear that they expect us to match their determination in order to fully enjoy it.
America is broken, and it’s up to you to put it back together again. It’s a tall order. A lot of people believe in it, but you’re not sure you do. It’ll take a lot of lonely, dangerous walks and exceptionally heavy lifting, and it’s not really clear what America means in the first place. For some reason, you set out anyway, trudging through wetlands and rocky hills on foot, not fully knowing or understanding where you’re going. Other than the monsters you can’t quite see, there’s not really anyone else around most of the time–just you and your thoughts, one foot in front of the other.
On one level, Death Stranding is about America. But your actual goal in setting out across the country is to help people, bring them together, and forge connections, not for the vague concept of America but for the sake of helping the people within it. Death Stranding is unrelenting in its earnestness and optimism–certainly not without its critiques of America, nor without its challenges and setbacks, but inherently hopeful nonetheless. It is a dense, complex, slow game with a plot that really goes places, but at its core, it never stops being about the sheer power and purpose we can find in human connection, and that is its most remarkable achievement.
Hands Across America
Rebuilding the country is as simple as getting every far-flung city, outpost, and individual onto one network, the bones of which were laid down by a pseudo-government organization called Bridges. As Sam Porter Bridges (played by Norman Reedus), all you have to do to win people over is bring them packages; most people never go outside due to mysterious monsters called BTs, but unlike most people, Sam can sense them enough to sneak past them and get important cargo to its destination.
Deliveries can be arduous. You’re evaluated on your deliveries across a few categories, but the condition of the cargo can make or break a run, and there are a lot of factors working against you. The landscape can be extremely punishing, from expanses of exhaustingly rocky hills to rivers that are too deep and wide to cross unaided. On top of BTs, you also have to contend with Timefall, a kind of rain that rapidly accelerates aging and deterioration for most of the things it touches. Extended exposure to Timefall can damage or completely ruin your cargo, as can slipping and falling, getting hit by an enemy, or, in some cases, just being a little too rough with it. Even the smallest rocks can trip you up, too. In order to keep your footing, you need to pay close attention to where you’re stepping, keeping your balance with the triggers while on rough terrain or when carrying a lot of stuff.
Once you reach your destination, though, you’re showered with praise. The recipient will likely thank you to your face (albeit as a hologram), and then they’ll give you a series of social media-style likes. You’re inundated with a multi-page results screen itemizing all the likes you received for the delivery and in which categories, plus an overall rating for the delivery itself, no matter how small–it’s positive reinforcement turned up to 11. These likes then funnel into each of the delivery categories like experience points, and as you level up, you can carry more weight or better maintain your balance, among other benefits. Deliveries also feed into a connection rating with each city, outpost, or person, and as that increases, you acquire better gear and sometimes gifts to reward your efforts further.
In short, you give a lot and get a lot in return. There is a relatively small number of mandatory deliveries to advance the story, but there’s a seemingly unlimited number of optional deliveries, and I often found myself picking up orders destined for any place that was on my way. It’s a cycle that’s easy to get swept up in; no matter how difficult a delivery or how far the distance, you will at least be met with gratitude, likely feel fulfilled from having completed a tough delivery, and often given a tool to make future deliveries a bit easier. Most importantly, though, increasing your bonds with people is how you get them on the network, and the network is what elevates this core loop beyond the simple satisfaction of completing tasks and getting rewards.
The chiral network is a kind of souped-up internet that allows you to 3D print objects, which is incredibly useful and a strong incentive in itself. When at a terminal connected to the chiral network, you can print ladders and ropes for traversal, new boots as yours wear out, repair spray for damaged containers, and basically anything else you need to safely deliver cargo so long as you have a blueprint for it. You can also print a portable printer that builds structures for you out in open areas covered by the network–things like bridges, watchtowers, and generators, the latter of which are critical as you start to use battery-powered exoskeletons and vehicles.
The chiral network also grants you access to the online component of the game, which is absolutely essential. You never see other players in the flesh, but their impact is all around you; once an area is on the network, you can see structures and objects left behind by other players in the course of their own journeys, plus helpful signs they’ve put down just for those who come after them. You can pick up someone else’s lost cargo and deliver it for them, too, knowing that someone else may find yours at some point and do you the same kindness.
In Death Stranding’s best moments, the relief and gratitude you can feel toward someone you don’t even know is an unrivaled multiplayer experience. At one point in my playthrough, I was being chased by MULEs, human enemies who love to steal cargo. I was on a bike, tasked with a time-sensitive delivery, almost out of battery and totally unequipped to deal with external threats. In my panic, I drove my bike into a ravine. As I slowly made my way up and out of it, I watched as my bike’s battery dipped into the red, and I dreaded getting stuck with all my cargo and no vehicle, still quite a ways away from my destination. I rounded a corner and found myself in the charging area of a generator placed by another player, as if they’d known I’d need it in that exact spot at that exact moment. They probably just put it there because they needed a quick charge, but to me, it was a lifeline.
You can give and receive likes for these player-to-player structures, and just like with standard deliveries, it’s a strong incentive to do something helpful for someone else. In the earlier sections of the game, I was using other people’s structures far more than I was leaving behind help for others. But I wanted to pay it forward and know that my help was appreciated, so I started going out of my way to build structures I myself didn’t really need; the map shows the online structures in your instance, making it easier to spot areas you could fill in for others. At first, the likes system seems like a pretty obvious commentary on social media and our dependence on external validation. But it’s not so much a critique as it is a positive spin on a very human need for acceptance, and the system does a remarkable job of urging you to do your best for those around you, NPCs and real people alike. Feeling truly appreciated can be a rare occurrence in life, and it’s powerful in its simplicity here.
The Super BB Method
The first few hours of the game are the slowest, and a large part of that is because you don’t have access to the online component right away. It’s an incredibly lonely stretch of time during which you mostly just walk; the work you do early on is especially laborious in the absence of advanced gear, and it serves to give you an appreciation for other players and better gear as you move forward.
Even as the gameplay opens up, you continue to get a lot of story exposition with almost no explanation. It can all seem kind of goofy at first, and you can get lost in the metaphors; every city you need to add to the chiral network has “knot” in its name, for example, and they are all referred to as “knots” on a strand that connects the country. There’s bizarre and unwarranted product placement in the form of Monster Energy drinks and the show Ride with Norman Reedus. Guillermo del Toro’s likeness is used for a kind of dorky character called Deadman, and there’s a woman named Fragile in a game about delivering packages.
But the story really does go deeper than that. In keeping with the theme of human connection, each of the core characters you meet and work with has their own story to tell. They all have a unique perspective on death that lends them an equally unique perspective on life, and unravelling their characters, down to the true origins of their often literal names, contributes to the overall tapestry of Death Stranding’s take on the human experience. As they open up to Sam, Sam opens up to them in turn, developing into a distinct character in his own right out of the reserved, emotionless man he appears to be at the start. I grew to love Sam, Fragile, and Heartman especially, and even the characters I didn’t like as much add to the game’s overall message about hope and love in the face of adversity.
By far my favorite character–and the most important one–is BB. BBs are infants in pods that can detect the presence of BTs, and they’re issued to porters like Sam to help them navigate dangerous territory. You’re told to treat BBs like equipment, not real babies, but it’s impossible to think of your BB that way. It’s full of personality, giggling when happy and crying when stressed out; it even gives you likes from time to time. There aren’t many children left in Death Stranding’s isolated, fearful world, but BB is your reminder that the future is counting on you, regardless of how you feel about America itself. The love that grows between Sam and BB is nothing short of heartwarming.
Connecting with this story, just as with connecting with NPCs and other players, can take work. It’s not a story that immediately clicks on a surface level, and the dramatic mystery and off-the-wall science don’t make too much sense at first blush. But it’s an emotional story first and foremost, and making sense of things–while entirely possible, particularly if you read the letters and interviews that detail small bits of lore as you go–is not as important as reflecting on how it makes you feel.
You have plenty of opportunities to do that, too. In the quiet moments of travel, usually as you near your destination, music might start to play. The soundtrack, which is largely composed of one band–Low Roar–is phenomenal, the kind of contemplative folk-ish music that suits a trip alone through a meadow or down a mountain. Because the act of walking is so involved, it’s not a time to detach completely and zone out; it’s a time to feel your feelings or at least consider what’s next in your travels.
Fight, But Not To The Death
You can just as soon be ripped out of that headspace, though, by a shift to the haunting music that signals BT territory. The otherworldly growls of BTs as they close in on you can be terrifying, and early on, your best bet is to freeze in your tracks and hold your breath for as long as you can so you can quietly sneak by them. But there are times when you have to fight a BT in its true form, and for that, you have specialized weapons to take them down. These BTs aren’t the ethereal humanoid shapes that float above the ground but huge eldritch horrors that screech under clouds of blood. The combat is mechanically simple–you mostly have to move around a bit and hit them before they hit you–but the sequences are visually and aurally arresting.
You don’t get a gun that works on live enemies until 25 or so hours in, but even then, it’s non-lethal. You are actively guided away from killing in Death Stranding, because when people die, their bodies basically go nuclear and level cities, leaving nothing but craters and BTs in their wake. On top of that, the main human enemies are MULEs, former porters just like Sam that have been corrupted by an automated world–they’ve essentially become addicted to snatching cargo in their desperation to have a job and a purpose as more and more people become replaced by machines. They’re not evil, and killing them seems like, well, overkill; it’s easy enough to knock them out with the nonlethal methods you continue to unlock as the game progresses. I didn’t kill a single one in my playthrough, though punching them is satisfying.
While BTs and MULEs are a concern when delivering cargo, there’s also Mads Mikkelsen’s character, a man who’s introduced through memories Sam sees when he connects to BB’s pod. He gets his own dedicated segments that punctuate hours of simple deliveries, and these highly contained, much shorter sections are striking in their art direction and juxtaposition to the rest of the game. It’s not immediately clear what he is, whether it’s an enemy, potential friend, or something else entirely, but he’s captivating in his ambiguity.
The most cartoonish enemy is Troy Baker’s Higgs, a terrorist whose depravity seems to know no bounds. Of all the characters, Higgs is the weakest, with far less nuance to him than anyone else in the cast. He’s really just there as a Big Bad to motivate you in a more traditional video game sense than delivering packages and helping people, but he and his band of faceless terrorists are more a means to an end than full-fledged villains. He’s the catalyst for some of the major BT fights, and in the end, perhaps an extreme reminder that it’s possible to stay hopeful even when things are darkest.
Death Stranding argues in both its story and its gameplay that adversity itself is what makes things worth doing and life worth living.
Death Stranding is a hard game to absorb. There are many intertwining threads to its plot, and silly names, corny moments, and heavy exposition belie an otherwise very simple message. That comes through much more clearly in the game’s more mundane moments, when you find a desperately-needed ladder left behind by another player or receive a letter from an NPC thanking you for your efforts. It’s positive without ignoring pain; in fact, it argues in both its story and its gameplay that adversity itself is what makes things worth doing and life worth living. It’s a game that requires patience, compassion, and love, and it’s also one we really need right now.
Warning: FULL SPOILERS ahead for Terminator: Dark Fate.
The latest Terminator movie – Terminator: Dark Fate – has landed in theatres, and it brings with it the return of original creator James Cameron, as well as original stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton. But not only that, it also brings a bunch of questions that have us asking ‘WTF?’ Wouldn’t be a time-travel movie without them, really.
In an attempt to put the record straight, we’ve read up on our Terminator lore, examined the previous films, and even spoken to producer James Cameron about some of the questions we have. Some make sense, others… well, make even less sense the more you think about them. And they’re all here for you to try and wrap your head around, too.
Ubisoft has announced its first games for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlett. In an earnings call this week, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot confirmed that the five games it plans to launch in Fiscal Year 2021 will be released on both current-generation and next-generation consoles.
These include Watch Dogs: Legion, Rainbow Six Quarantine, and Gods & Monsters, as well as two further titles that have not been announced yet. Ubisoft’s Fiscal Year 2021 runs April 1, 2020 through March 31, 2021. The PS5 and Xbox Scarlett are each scheduled for release in Holiday 2020.
“The five titles will be on this generation and next generation of consoles, and they will take full advantage of all the new features that are coming with the machines,” Guillemot said, as reported by IGN. “Which are actually going to be extremely interesting for players, as you’ll be able to download new content a lot faster. Players will experience better framerate, so there are lots of very good elements that will come with those new machines.”
Watch Dogs: Legion, Rainbow Six Quarantine, and Gods & Monsters were all recently delayed, and are now scheduled to release during FY21.
With the PS5 and Scarlett coming in Holiday 2020 we may well see even more cross-generation games from Ubisoft and other publishers. During the last major console transition from PS3 to PS4 and Xbox 360 to Xbox One, cross-gen titles included Watch Dogs and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag from Ubisoft, as well as high-profile shooters Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty: Ghosts.
Death is such a major part of video games, but rarely in a way that’s constructive–it’s most commonly a failure mechanic for you or the ever-present goal for you to enact on others, regardless of whether you’re facing other players or NPCs. A story-driven game’s most dramatic moment may use the death of a beloved character to create a severe emotional response and plenty of horror games rely on surprising character deaths to produce jump scares. But that’s usually the extent to what games do with death. So in the few cases when games actually do deal with death and grief as a reality, it’s almost always surprising.
Video games should talk about death more. And I don’t mean just show it; more games should really talk about it and explore how normal it is. Video games too often gloss over or demonize death but that’s not an accurate reflection of real life. We’re all going to die someday, as are everyone we know. And as frightening as that may be, those deaths will probably be boringly normal. So too, in turn, are the emotions associated with coming to terms with that, whether it’s depression, grief, anger, or acceptance.
It can be difficult to talk about death, especially in the western part of the world where it’s almost considered a taboo topic for everyday conversation, but that’s all the more reason that people should. Continuing to shy away from the uncomfortable nature of death and grief prevents the normalization of both.
Several games have already started the conversation by putting you into the role of a caretaker of the deceased–encouraging you to think about dying and to normalize the associated feelings. The upcoming cozy management game about dying, Spiritfarer, is one such example. The Thunder Lotus Games title sees you play as Stella, a ferrymaster who sails through a purgatory-like setting in search of lost souls to befriend before helping them move on to the afterlife. Laundry Bear Games’ A Mortician’s Tale takes a less mystical approach, having you play as a funeral director, Charlie, who prepares bodies for burial. Giant Sparrow has also created an experience where you care for the dying in What Remains of Edith Finch–a more figurative case where you ensure a dead family is remembered by helping its last surviving member, Edith, tell their stories.
“I think it’s funny the way that, in a lot of art forms, you’ll see several people exploring the same area suddenly, and it’s just like something that bubbles up, and maybe that’s some of what we’re seeing in games right now,” What Remains of Edith Finch creative director Ian Dallas said in an interview with GameSpot. “A lot of people have had similar reactions and thoughts, and now we’re starting to see the fruits of that on the developer side.”
In regards to how Thunder Lotus Games decided to approach death positivity in Spiritfarer, creative director Nicolas Guérin said, “We stumbled into the idea of trying to talk about death in a positive way, which is [a subject] we should all be trying to do more with … Death is terrible. It sucks. It’s something that we can’t really escape and it’s actually pretty tough to casually talk about.”
For a game centered around death, Spiritfarer’s visuals are remarkably positive. The world is illustrated in bright colors, a cheery soundtrack accompanies the rhythmic hum of your ferry’s engine, and you can seemingly just hug people whenever you want. Despite half of its story taking place in a morgue, A Mortician’s Tale also steers clear of gore and morbid imagery, presenting its world in a muted-purple and the characters with exaggerated proportions. What Remains of Edith Finch puts a surreal, almost otherworldly spin on its terrifying tales, which Dallas thinks helps transform the game into a collection of “campfire stories.”
So none of them are doom and gloom all the time, and the three don’t try to meddle with their death-positive message by getting into the nitty gritty of religion and faith. “We made sure that the game was agnostic and not taking sides about who’s right and who’s wrong [when it comes to] heaven and stuff like that,” Guérin said. “The only position we take is to say that death is okay. It’s okay to be fragmented. It’s okay to feel lost in grief. It’s okay to have all those negative emotions.”
The key to conveying this message, according to Guérin, is to not preach to the player. You can’t just tell someone to believe that it’s okay to talk about death or that they should allow themselves to feel sad when someone dies. You make a good game and then include this message within its mechanics, encouraging players to act through the movements of a character. In Spiritfarer, for example, you literally can’t continue through the game without talking to the spirits you encounter, which leads you to learn their stories, befriend them, and want to walk them through their own lingering grief. The grieving process and personal stories for each spirit are different, allowing you to engage with a range of experiences and emotions for what it’s like to care for someone in their final moments. Then the game takes them away from you one at a time, just like death does in real life, and you’re forced to acknowledge that they’re gone forever (at least until you start a new playthrough, of course).
“It’s something that I think more designers should be doing,” Guérin said. “[I] want to make [stories] that only games can achieve, using game mechanics to say something that can only be experienced in that specific medium.” For Guérin, video games offer opportunities to talk about death and grief in ways that movies and books simply can’t–largely because games can force someone to interact as a part of the story instead of allowing them to passively observe.
It’s a sentiment shared by A Mortician’s Tale game designer Gabby DaRienzo. “A Mortician’s Tale is meant to be an accurate-but-gentle game about being a funeral director, and we wanted to make sure all the mechanics in the game supported this. As a funeral director supporting those in grief, your job is largely to listen rather than speak,” DaRienzo said.
“A Mortician’s Tale is a death-positive game–meaning that our goal was to speak as openly and gently about the topic of death, grief, and the funeral industry as possible,” she continued. Charlie’s story is very linear, without much in the way of choice–but the game uses its on-the-rails gameplay loop and simple mechanics to create a powerful story. “In the game, we force players to go through a daily loop–reading emails, preparing the bodies of the deceased, and attending their respective funerals,” DaRienzo said. “This goes on, day after day, and the player becomes accustomed to this mundane loop. When a day comes that Charlie is tasked with preparing the body of a man in which no one attends his funeral, the player is suddenly thrown for an emotional loop.”
The scene in question certainly rocked me the first time I played through A Mortician’s Tale. I was struck by how sad it was that, in the urn of ashes in front of me, lay the remains of a man who apparently had nobody in his life–or at least no one who cared. It’s one of the few moments in A Mortician’s Tale where you have a choice: you can walk around the room, return to your work station and prepare the next body, or go up to the urn and give a little nod of respect. I chose the latter, even though I knew next to nothing about the deceased–seeing as I had no one to ask about who he was. And although I mostly did it because I felt bad for the dude, a small part of me wanted to do it for me. In the event I die alone, I’d like to hope that at least one person (even if they don’t know me) will take the time to remember that I was here and that I mattered, much like Charlie did for this man. It’s something I hadn’t really thought about before that moment, and I’ve had small realizations like this for most of the indie games I’ve played that revolve around death and grieving.
“I think it’s easiest to see and understand death on the effect it has on everyone around us,” A Mortician’s Tale writer Kait Tremblay said. “I mean, that’s how we know and understand death, right? Our experiences are always focused through how it affects us and so writing A Mortician’s Tale definitely focused on this: what does death leave behind, how do we pick up the pieces, how do we find our way through mourning, and understand our feelings about what has happened? Because we have to keep living and we have to find a way of accepting death, and that’s kind of what A Mortician’s Tale is about, in some respects, right? It’s about that conversation, about understanding death, and finding a way through it, so focusing on the mourners embodies this.”
Granted, taking a harder look at the uncomfortable emotions surrounding death is not going to make any of those feelings suddenly easier to deal with or make the grieving process for a loved one any less sad. But at the very least, death and grief deserve to be treated as things that are normal. Your calm acceptance of a loved one’s passing is just as valid as breaking down in tears–and how you continue to deal with the grief in the aftermath isn’t likely to be exactly the same with every death in your life. Video games can’t and shouldn’t handle the complete burden of normalizing what it means to come to terms with dying and grieving for a lost loved one, but considering how many kids do play them, they’re an excellent portal for broaching the subject and informing people they are allowed to dig deeper, ask questions, and embrace their emotions.
I wish that, as a kid, I would have had something like Spiritfarer, A Mortician’s Tale, What Remains of Edith Finch, or any of the other games that put you into the role of a caretaker of someone who is dead or dying (Blackwood Crossing, To the Moon, and That Dragon, Cancer, just to name a few more). Media that is strictly educational is fine, but it’s hard to absorb something when it feels like you’re being preached at. These games do for death what games like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice do for mental illness–they’re not hitting you over the head with the message you should normalize something that has been demonized for years as something scary and evil. They’re just good games, ones that also happen to use their mechanics to lead you towards making your own conclusions.
“It’s nice that games are reexamining some of the elements that have been with us for a long time, but have just gotten this patina of conventional ways [in how] they’re handled,” Dallas said. “[Like] enemies just flicker away when they die–that’s an approach to death that we just think [to include] automatically. I think that’s fine for [certain] games, but there’s so much more interesting stuff to explore that I’m happy to see other games moving into.”
“I’m pretty sure tons of triple-A developers want to do games like this too; they want to tackle complex subjects,” Guérin added, speaking to his experience as a game designer at Electronic Arts and level designer director at Ubisoft. “It’s just that the system is not working for them–in the sense that you have to sell a shit ton of those games and make sure that you can recoup your investment … You have to make sure that everything you do pleases a much larger crowd.”
Guérin went on to point out that the triple-A games that are beginning to go into topics like this are the ones that can afford to. They’re either games like Red Dead Redemption 2, which are made by studios that already have a proven track record of broaching complex content, or they’re games like The Last of Us, first-party exclusives that are usually allowed to be a bit more experimental. Still, he adds, triple-A games are rarely allowed to be as niche as an indie game. “Triple-A games are awesome but they need to [fit] on a broader spectrum,” Guérin said.
It’s unlikely that we’ll soon see as many triple-A games tackle death and grieving as well and as thoroughly as the indie games that are doing so already. But as more games like Spiritfarer make a splash at E3 and ones like What Remains of Edith Finch and A Mortician’s Tale leave lasting impacts, it increases the chances of more studios choosing to change how we experience death and grief in games. “[These games] are about dying, but at the same time [saying] dying is okay,” Guérin concludes. “It’s normal. It’s human. You know, people who die still watch football matches and TV. They don’t stop doing everything … Enjoying life is part of the message as well.”
To stay up to date on Nicolas Guérin, check out Spiritfarer–which is due to release in 2020. Gabby DaRienzo is now an artist at Drinkbox Studios, the developers behind games like Severed and Guacamelee. Kait Tremblay has taken her talents to Ubisoft Toronto, where she’s lead narrative designer for Watch Dogs Legion–recently delayed to the latter half of 2020. Ian Dallas is still at Giant Sparrow, leading the charge on the indie studio’s third game.
As part of its latest earnings report, Nintendo updated its list of the top-selling Switch games made by Nintendo and revealed some impressive statistics about attach rates.
Mario Kart 8 Ultimate is the Switch’s best-selling game, with 19.01 million copies sold. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate climbed to 15.71 million units sold, which makes it the best-selling Smash game of all time. It surpasses Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii, which sold 13.3 million units. It’s also ahead of the combined sales of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS (14.91 million).
Nintendo also shared new details on attach rates of its biggest games, and they are impressive. 45.6 percent of Switch players own a copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, while the attach rates for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, and Smash Bros. Ultimate are each above 30 percent. As Ahmad reminds us, Nintendo has historically had one of the highest attach rates for a platform-holder, and it seems that is continuing with Switch.
Nintendo has always had high software attach rates, but here is a chart that puts it into perspective. 45.6% of Nintendo Switch owners have a copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Smash, BOTW and Odyssey have impressive attach rates too. pic.twitter.com/cjLY3FFQoa
