You know, the more I think about this (and maybe many of you have already arrived at this conclusion) I feel like Nintendo is taking a huge hit with this Ambassador program, and makes me a bit more thankful for getting it.
I know we think about this is "digital copies cost them nothing, free for us, free for them" but I think we have to also consider the losses in potential sales here. You know how a lot of publishers bemoan piracy because each pirated copy of a game is one less copy they sold? The counter argument (and what makes such logic shaky) is that there's no guarantee that the person pirating it would have actually bought it, and that in fact, it seems more than likely that those chances are quite low.
But with the Ambassadors, most of us (800,000 in North America, at least) were hardcore Nintendo fans. If these ambassador games came up for sale on the eshop and we weren't getting them for free, then chances are quite high that we would have paid money for these. I know I would have, and I know for damn sure that I'm not the only one in these forums who would. Now, I have no idea what kind of sales the eshop pulls in, what the attach rates are for eshop sales, etc. But I would imagine among early adopters, it would be high, at least half?
And out of those games, I would have bought every single one of them when their turn came up on eshop. I bought tennis, for crying out loud. I've had to recharge my 3DS wallet, in $50 increments, 2 times already, and I'm starting to run low again. I have Super Mario Land on my Gameboy, I still have my gameboy (in a box somewhere), but I still bought that game when it came out.
In other words, all that estimated $100 to $120 of ambassador games? Nintendo has lost those potential sales from me.
And another side effect is that if they give me all those games, or a big chunk of those games, all at once, chances are very high that I may skip purchasing eshop releases for a few weeks. More lost sales there.
I posted (either in this thread or a similar one) that this ambassador thing costs Nintendo nothing. I was wrong. It is costing them quite a lot.
Topic: Nintendo Introduces Ambassadors Program for 3DS (Read 8590 times)
