I can't find the topic where someone claimed Nintendo would never use the VC for indie games because it would make too much sense, so I'll bump this instead.
Iwata-san says:Quote
Well, allow me to explain, since this is something I started. Basically, I want to expand the range of prices at which games are sold. For example, Nintendo's approach until about 5 years ago, was to generally sell software at prices around MSRP of 4800 yen for handheld games and about a MSRP of 6800 yen for home console games. Now I think that this approach might have been wrong. Frankly speaking, if all home console titles are sold at a MSRP of 6800 yen, then a simple game like Tetris would never see the light of day on this format. I mean, I don't think our customers would shell out up to 6800 yen just for Tetris. So, can we justify selling Tetris at this price by adding thirty new game modes, or by adding some fancy movies? In short, we can't, and that's a problem. Another issue was, development costs naturally vary depending on the size of the team and time period needed to develop a game, and money people are willing to pay for a game varies depending on the total play time and difficulty level, but the game price points were more or less the same all the time. Of course, some people think that the price of software should decrease over time. However, long-term price cuts aside, if you lower the price of your software in too short of a cycle, people who have already purchased that software will feel cheated. This is something I want to avoid. In that sense, I feel it would be better for softwares to be released at a range of prices that's appropriate for the software right from the start. Nevertheless, you'll never be able to set a price lower than the standard if you try to sell a game using existing means of distribution. That is, as long as this is a business in which you have the added cost of making ROMs and discs to sell. Shops won't make a profit if you make your title too cheap, meaning that they won't stock it, and at the very least, the maker can't set the price lower than the cost of the media format. There are little games which are great fun but don't take long to complete. As things stand, it's impossible to, for example, sell these for 1000 yen. These ideas just die on the vine, and I've always wondered if there might be some way to save them. Although we're currently trying to introduce a variety of MSRP prices into the Nintendo DS line-up, this is really something that I've been talking about within the company for a while, isn't it?
(This is on the subject of the "Shopping Channel," or VC interface.)
So a big raspberry to you, whoever you were!
Edit: To make it clearer that Nintendo is seriously considering indie games on the VC:
Quote
Talking of potential, we may even be able to create an opportunity for amateur developers where they can release games that they have made, although this will be hard to do in the immediate future. The mechanics of the games industry at the moment doesn't allow games to be sold unless they're widely advertised by major publishers to earn greater profit. This seals off gateways into the game industry for new talents.
Topic: Rumored list of Virtual Console games at launch (Read 8713 times)
