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Originally posted by: zakkiel
There's nothing remotely difficult (or particularly revolutionary) in that Wired article, which I did just reread for your benefit. I don't disagree with most of it, just with your uncritical dumping of into the game industry without paying any attention to the realities of the business. The burden is on you to demonstrate that an alternative model will work. You haven't.
Prove? You expect me to prove? I wish I could, but I don't have access to solid numbers, and it's pretty ludicrous to expect anyone posting on the PGC boards to have them. From what I understand, however, art is the largest cost for making games today. The art cost is also largely under the developer's control - the only thing pushing up art costs is the hit centric business model. By making, for instance, flash available as an API, companies should be able to make games that are fun and that are rather cheap to produce. Hobbyists make flash games in their spare time, for crying out loud; it can't cost that much. I say that it makes the most sense to leave the option open and then let the developers figure out how much effort is worth putting into a game of what quality - because ultimately the devs do have some control over how much effort they put into a game, and that is what controls the cost. As long as Nintendo makes a decent 2D API available, and a suitable distribution channel with accompanying licensing fees, developers will use it.
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Here's the limit of the article: it devotes no space to considering production costs. All the products it examines in detail are low-cost, low-bandwidth. There are two exceptions. The first is videos, the second video games. In the case of videos we have no reason to assume that those non-hit videos that earn Blockbuster money aren't mostly just old hits. In the case of video games, we have the old hits explicitly described as such, and the article gives no numbers whatsoever on rising demand. (This is a general problem with it: a periodic absence of numbers in some vital areas, at least for our purposes - how much gaming revenue comes from non-hit games?). The "growing popularity" it describes could very easily be a brief surge in nostalgia among the Ian Sanes of the world. But possibly re-releasing old titles could be profitable up to a point, and Nintendo is doing just that. Too much, if you ask me, but it is.
Actually, the author talks about NetFlix. Blockbuster is used for illustrative purposes when talking about NetFlix. And in the NetFlix data he specifically mentions documentaries and Bollywood films. You can't seriously contend that those are "old hits." The only documentary to ever reach hit proportions, AFAIK, was Fahrenheit 911, and he gives numbers on how poor Bollywood flicks in the traditional channels do in the U.S. The point isn't that these things become hits, the point is that they do better under this distribution model.
He is, admittedly, a little vague on his Rhapsody numbers, but that's not the point. The point is that the expectation is that the new hits will sell really well, and most everything else isn't worth distributing. In a model where you had to take up shelf space in physical displays in geographically disparate locations, that is true. Just change the distribution model a little, however, and it's suddenly no longer true.
Low bandwidth? How much higher bandwidth can you get than movies (again: NetFlix)? I'll grant that downloading GameCube games, or even honestly N64 games, to a console isn't really practical, but that's where the "burn on demand" bit comes in. Even if it isn't really burn on demand, but just an online/mail order retailer only channel, it'll handle any amount of data you could realistically choose to throw at it.
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But when it comes to creating new low-caliber games, you still refuse to deal with production costs which I explicitly said were the problem. You can babble about distribution all you want, until you solve that problem it makes no difference.
I didn't refuse to answer. I explained to you that the rising costs bit is a fiction - costs are falling but the cutting edge is moving up faster than costs are falling, so the cost of cutting edge games is rising. I tried formulating the answer for second tier games several times, but it always boiled down to, "It depends on what kind of game the devs want to make, and how much effort they want to put into it." Once they figure those things out, then they can make the game. The reason I bring up distribution is because the number of sales a developer can expect determines their expected revenue. Their expected revenue determines their development budget. It is then up to the developer to figure out how to make the game as good as possible within the confines of that budget. At least, that's how any sane business operates. I had just assumed that this was common sense, though, so I didn't bother to explain it to you. I just gave you real world examples of developers who already work that way as a proof of concept. Without the benefits of Amazon style user recommendations, shareware game companies are producing games of a similar quality and at a similar price to what I would expect for the second tier. I assumed you would figure it out for yourself.
Just remember this equation is what determines "worth it" for a business: profit = revenue - costs. You're focusing heavily on the costs term. I'm focusing on how to increase the revenue term because I know that developers have a fair amount of freedom to adjust the costs to fit the revenue. Even the cutting edge game makers of today eventually declare the game good enough, stop dumping money into the art department, and ship. Once you open up alternate distribution channels with different revenue expectations, developers will figure out where the quality sweet spot is just like they do now on the GBA.
Now I have explained both how revenues would increase and costs are controllable, so I would think that the matter is settled.
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Oh please. There's a reason shareware developers aren't in the Big 4. There are lots of reasons the Wonderswan lost. And there's a reason Warcraft II Battle.net Edition brought in a tiny amount of revenue compared to Warcraft III and WoW. But yes, I already acknowledged that retro-releases can be profitable up to a point. They just represent very little profit compared to the hits in the video game industry, ports excepted.
So what? I never claimed that a company making a second tier game would make anywhere near as much as a hit. I went so far as to say that Nintendo abandoning hits altogether would be suicide. The point is that the games would be cheap and fast to make, and profitable (again, depending on design decisions made by the developer). Because they are profitable, there is someone who would be willing to make them. More importantly for Nintendo is that a lot of profitable non-hits can generate a lot of revenue. It also helps to fill increase the size of the library. It doesn't hurt at all that the steps to get such a second tier market going are essentially the same as the ones Nintendo needs to take to attract third party studios that make cutting edge games.
Putting the old games into the second tier channel is just common sense - all of the production costs are out of the way and advertising and promotion is unnecessary, so they only have to cover the marginal costs of distribution. Those are between tiny and miniscule, depending on which method is used. In other words, every retro game sold would be nearly pure profit even if they sold for $2-5 (+ S&H, if necessary). There are already good emulators that run on PowerPC and OpenGL, the GameCube CPU and API, respectively, so Nintendo would just have to license that code. Most of them are open source, to boot. In fact, as a side note, Sony already owns a PSOne emulator that runs on PowerPC (Connectix Virtual GameStation), though Sony bought it for different reasons
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BlackGriffen
Edit: "So I could close with "you're wrong." But what would the point of that be except to aggravate you? Better, I think, to keep the discussion to the substantive points. "
Point well taken. I was wrong to say it - naturally, you think I'm wrong and I think you're wrong, so it was at best pointless to say it. Thank you for being big about it.
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