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Originally posted by: zakkiel
I'll rephrase my point to make it a bit clearer: you cannot make a profit off of new 2G games now. The discepancy between value and cost is too big. Game companies trying to locate a favorable cost/return will be forced to one of the two ends of the spectrum. That means that you get Gen 1 and Gen 3 or better. The middle is untenable for companies.
Not familiar with Escape Velocity, but didn't it come out in the era of garage gaming companies, when you could make cutting edge for cheap? And thus EV was way closer to the top of the curve than similar games today.
Which am I supposed to believe - you, or my own eyes? The newest addition to the EV series came out 3/18/2002 and wasn't anywhere near cutting edge on release. Neither were Pillard of Garendall nor Deimo Rising in 2001. Uplink, released 5/27/2003, could have been considered cutting edge if it were released in 1995, but it's still a fun game.
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Um, yes. I adopted a different system for better differentiating games. It's a distinction with clear relevance to the market. You can't pretend it doesn't exist. And now I'm asking you to define what you mean by tier-2 in terms of that system, because it makes a difference in whether it can succeed or not, for the reasons I've put up three times now.
Sorry for being vague - what I was referring to was your admission that it was ludicrous to expect someone in a PGC forum to have solid numbers. Then, just a few paragraphs later, you ask for numbers again. You're right that your naming system better classifies the types of games available, but it is divorced from the realities that developers would face. They would face, essentially, first tier and second tier distribution channels, and would make their games appropriately for making profits in those channels. If I claimed that devs would make a profit making games of all quality levels, I was mistaken. Having multiple channels would increase the range of qualities for which new games are being made, but it would not guarantee that new games of all ranges would be made.
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I have an obsesssion with grounding quantitative arguments in quantitative facts. Unless you can do that - unless you can demonstrate that the costs of creating and marketing a pay-per-burn or massive download system and creating piracy protection would be outweighed by what you admit is a marginal source of revenue - then your argument is useless. Netflix doesn't have to invest anything to distribute the nonhits, because it already has an appropriate distribution system for the hits. Nintendo does not. You can't tell me we can ignore the cost of building and especially marketing this system, nor that we can blithely skip over any question of who, if anyone, would use it.
You make the mistake of assuming it would need to be advertised. You also make the mistake of thinking that you're worth the effort on my part to get some concrete numbers. I also only admitted that the revenue would be marginal for the game makers - Nintendo gets to amortize the costs across lots of different marginal revenue streams. It is by combining lots of marginal revenue streams that you get a significant one. After all, even the tier one channel is comprised of nothing but the revenue from millions of individual sales.
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I missed your security system. Can you point me to it?
For the really small games - NES - encrypt them in transit and don't permit the gamer to save them to a memory card. For the slightly larger ones, let the player save most of the game, encrypted, to a memory card. I say most because a small but crucial portion of the ROM will be excised from the saved version. That portion, a few KB, is to be supplied by Nintendo servers whenever the gamer wants to play.
It is more important, however, to sell the games for cheap enough that the effort to find a free ROM and get it into the N5 for playing or getting around the copy protection systems just isn't worth the hassle. Pirated games are only free, after all, if your time is worthless.
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In terms of old games, the limit is first the terrible press that rereleases tend to generate. It makes Nintendo look desperate, cheap, and staid, committed to gathering the low-hanging fruit rather than making something new.
It all depends on how you spin it. If you spin it like a rerelease, yeah it'll be problematic. If you spin it as an opening up of the old library all at once, it makes it harder to complain. The sheer number of titles would also insulate them from criticism. Most importantly, just make it a low key release - if Ninty doesn't try to brag about it, but just lets the word get around, then there's less reason for anyone to criticize.
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Second, the viability of multi-platform rereleases; if it's on gameboy, why would people bother with a home console version?
Because games fore the original GB and GBC are harder to come by now because it's all after-market.
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Third, the size of the game libraries themselves. If you have a navigation system, that system will by nature punish bad games so what would be the point of releasing them?
Because it would cost Nintendo more to figure out which games are bad than the miniscule server space they would take up.
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And Nintendo has already rereleased a lot of its classics in a form that will be playable this gen and next. Which brings me to the fourth limitation: backwards compatibility makes rereleases rather pointless. If everything after N64 is already playable, and old games are going to plummet to rock-bottom prices, what's the point of rereleasing them?
The point is that the cost is virutally nil - no need for development, marketing, or even manufacturing beyond what Nintendo has to have anyway. Also, as I mentioned, the cost of making the backward compatibility is measured in, at most, quadruple digits because the emulators already exist.
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The success of things like the OoT pack-in lies in the impossibility of playing them on the Cube. Backwards compatability isn't a terribly useful feature from a business perspective (Microsoft wasn't going to have it but feared the press backlash), but I think that shows the general lack of interest in having lots of old games available. No one's demonstrated that there is any market interest in rereleases except among old fans or on handhelds.
I never claimed it was more than a niche market. The profit margins are still absurdly high, though.
I also completely disagree about the usefulness of backward compatibility. In fact, for Nintendo, Rev backward compatibility with GC was critical for the GC. By extension, the perception of Nintendo in the market, and thus the Revolution as well. I actually started another thread on that very topic a few months back ("The Case for Rev Backward Compatibility" IIRC). For Sony and MS, it's less critical, but still useful. If nothing else, it reassures potential customers who don't already own the old system to have access to a large library from the beginning.
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Nintendo is trying to architect hit games with broad appeal. I see no evidence that they're thinking in any terms but hits.
It certainly seems to me like they're talking about niche games which are, by definition, not hits. Nintendo needs to make hits, but not every game needs to be a hit. The truely important measure of whether to make and distribute a game should be profitability, not whether it will be a hit or not.
BlackGriffen
Topic: The Long Tail and Nintendo's Future (Read 13121 times)
