It's their level of aggression towards fan projects that sets them apart I think.

It's the way they go after fan projects like rom hacks, the way they continuously rerelease 30 year old gameswith minor tweaks for full price, their obsession with destroying emulators, the fact that all of their IP is exclusive to their console, their games rarely go on sale, and their prices are far too high considering their hardware is like 3 generations behind the curve.

It's not that they want money, Nintendo is mainly anticonsumerist, but they're also a terrible, evil company. Here's a couple examples why i think so off the top of my head:

• Locked down hardware. Well, at least they try to lock it down as much as possible.
• Insane prices for hardware and games. (50 quid for base Animal Crossing fucked me off when I realised that the DLC costs 50 quid fucking more, i returned my Switch).
• Shitty customer service (look up joy con drift)
• Lawsuits left and right:
  • DMCA to strike down FOSS emulators because they included a 16 byte decryption key that's literally public knowledge at this point. Funnily enough, they use a similar FOSS emulator in their own products.
  • Sued the small company that owns Pal World because they included some of their "patents". We all know that's bullshit.
  • Sued a journalist for writing for a blog about piracy and fucked his life despite him having no involvement in any of the development. (he was forced to take a deal to avoid them making things worse.)
  • Sued a guy who did in fact enable piracy. That's fair. Taking 30% of his income for the rest of his life is fucking evil.
  • Fucked over streamers playing the game on release day because they were in an earlier timezome than japan...
  • Fucked over creators playing their games with an emulator.
  • Fucked over creators on all platforms in general for literally no reason.
  • Took down many MANY fan projects because they could.
• They got mad at event organisers and pulled out last minute because the organisers used a mod to allow internet multiplayer, which caused the official Smash tourney to be cancelled during covid...

meanwhile Valve:

• makes the hardware as open as possible:
  • also literally wrote proton
  • also feel free to use any input device to play games
  • also your game console is a fully functional computer you can do whatever the fuck you want with.
  • also, your screen broke? Here, let me help you fix it.
• charges reasonable amounts:
  • 30% from the developer is industry standard
  • has frequent sales
  • orange box costs like a quid on sale and the lastest halflife costs about 20 on sale.
• you can "return" games if you don't like them.
• first class customer service.
• got a guy arrested for hacking and leaking their source code, which is fair.
• allows and enourages modding.
• massive supporter and contributor of tournaments of their games
• allows the use of their IPs in transformative ways (3rd party games, sfm, etc).

but yeah. They're clealy the same thing. no differences whatsoever.

They been selling a TON of overpriced garbage as of late

Blasphemy!

Yeah. Valve's 30% cut is greed. So is their (alleged) anticompetitive behavior of forcing price parity with other stores (aka devs can't price things cheaper than Steam elsewhere).

I mean, I like their store. I like most of their behavior, but I am also waiting for the hammer to drop, and everyone should.

I will keep giving money to companies that select good policies and praxis. It is alarming that it only happens when companies are young and that they turn into multi national demonic entities when they grow past a certain level for some reason, but at that point we can only sigh and but a rubber band around the growth and start cutting off the oxygen supply so we can saw it off

The force streamers and people who cover Nintendo to pay them, because word of mouth isn't enough. They need money.

They have and continue to directly or aid in the effort to patten basic game mechanics.

They refuse to participate in cross play functionality often.

They kill fan projects because fuck you for liking our games and bringing more attention to them I guess.

They lock games away forever, not rereleasing and killing mods aggressively. Actively killing gaming history.

A company doesn't have to be my friend. But when they are actively attacking people who express love for their product you eventually stop loving the product.