Topic: Reggie Fils-Aime on the Garage Developer

[NWR_insanolord]

Link's Awakening is the second best Zelda game ever; SML is quite a bit further down on the list of Marios.

[Ian Sane]

  What Nintendo really needs to do is move away from flat pricing for Virtual Console games. Certain games are worth more than others, and the prices should reflect that. Given the announced games, Link's Awakening is worth quite a bit more than Super Mario Land. I'd have no problem whatsoever paying $5 for LA, but there are plenty of GBC games where that wouldn't be true.

Yeah, that would tones of sense.  I mean you see it as stores that sell used games.  There's a place I go to all the time for old games and it isn't like every NES game is this price and every SNES game is that price.  Some NES games will go for $2 while I paid $20 for the Legend of Zelda.  They charge $30 for Super Mario Kart because it's a popular title while other games are $5.  Ebay is the same way.  There are huge fluxuations in prices for games on the same system depending on how popular the game is.
 
Though the thing is that some of the VC titles are actually a bargain.  While some games are overpriced some titles like Ogre Battle are an absolute steal.  If Nintendo got the idea in their heads to have price fluxuation on the VC they might also get it into their head that they could charge $20 for Super Metroid.
 
What is a big problem with this online store model is that there is only one store so there is no price competition.  There is one store in the entire world that sells the product.  So no wonder we don't get sales or any sort of pricing based on demand.  The lack of physical supply also means that no one is trying to unload excess merchandise.  It isn't really any extra cost to Nintendo if a game isn't selling well at it's current price point.

[KDR_11k]

What they don't want is the Indie stuff on XBLA. The vast majority of stuff on the service is just a riff on the tutorials included in the dev kit. "Who wants a massager?"

That's only a tiny part. The rest is genuine garbage produced with the best of intentions. Think Atari crash era.

[MegaByte]

What they don't want is the Indie stuff on XBLA. The vast majority of stuff on the service is just a riff on the tutorials included in the dev kit. "Who wants a massager?"

Well that's fine. Microsoft solves that by keeping indie separate from the rest of the service (and a higher threshold to publish on the main service). They don't have the most optimal solution, but at least they have something.