I wrote this a bit ago, but I will post it here. Didn't see a related topic so I made a new one.
With Nintendo first loss in decades it seems that Nintendo is less willing to take risk when it comes to localizing titles especially with physical media. A good example of this would be the project Rainfall titles. The titles were translated and localized for Europe why did NoA bulk at localizing it for the US and Canada, the biggest reason is the investment that was still involved. Nintendo as a whole is a conservative company when it comes to taking risks. And profits were falling because of the rising yen and the long console cycle taking it toll. The media involved is the single biggest investment outside of originally developing a game for a publisher. Once it is made you cannot unmake it, and if you have a game were you expect it do a certin amount and it doesn’t cover the investment especially if they are only expect 100,000 titles the investment may not be worth it, since if it doesn’t sell you will be sitting on the unshipped discs. And the ET incident and more recently the Gamecube over production incident may be in Nintendo’s mind.
With the advent of their new machines they are also having digital copies of their game along side of the physical copies which softens the investment to localize titles, since there is an option of having it all digital in nature. So games like Project X Zone may see release outside of Japan, in the form of a digital release. More examples could be Radient Historia, if the digital version could of been offered the supply issues could of been avoided since they don’t run the chance of under-estimating the needs of the market also.
The problem is support where the support of the 3DS/WiiU eShop is better than the WiiWare it still not totally there yet, though there are promising results. So if there is a digital version I suggest buy it. It will show Nintendo and other publishers that there is a market for these games, and there is a market for games that may or may not originally see the day of light from the bigger publishers since the investment to bring them out will be lower so less games may be canceled because they are not considered projects that would make back the money.
Also promotions such as Nintendo’s Digital Deluxe Promotion may see an extension, which I would very much like to see since it is effectively reducing the price of the digital games 10%.
There are other benefits to supporting digital like helping smaller developers prove their worth so they can fund more ambitious titles.
That's a very interesting argument BlkPaladin! And honestly, I'm excited with the eShop, I really am impressed with the availability of not only indie games on there, but plenty of retail games day and date as well!
However, like IanSane, I really want to have physical copies whenever possible. There are some games I'd be willing to get digital, like Animal Crossing or Mario Kart, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule. Of course, I have no problems with buying games digitally if that's the only way I can get them.
Is this really what it boils down to for me? I could possibly effect more financial support for the content creators if I bought my Wii U games digitally, but unfortunately as a consumer the thing that wins me over to physical copies is not just the utility of sharing and selling back, but also hard copy archiving and the potentially unhealthy fetishism of actually owning a physical skyscraper of games I haven't yet played?
Topic: Like niche game? Support the eShop (Read 10151 times)
