Comics To Be Distributed On GBA Flashcarts In Japan

Thanks to 1UP for its article discussing plans to distribute comic strips via Game Boy Advance flash RAM cartridges in Japan. The cart will be released in August by the same company (Toshiba/AM3) as the previously mentioned Advance Movie Player system, and both will share a distribution scheme "...similar to Nintendo's own vending-machine distribution of 16-bit Super Famicom games. Consumers would buy blank cartridges separately and download content into them at kiosk terminals, placed at game stores and other locations, and then view that content on their GBAs."

Comments

Cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

So would you have to pay to download the comics, media, whatever? Or is this a free service after buying the cartridges?

Re:Cost?

[arb]

Of course there will be a charge to download the media - how else are they to pay for the content? The Super Famicom system mentioned in the article charge about 500 yen to download a game IIRC.

Re:Cost?

[lightspawn]

So would you have to pay to download the comics, media, whatever? Or is this a free service after buying the cartridges?

In order to make enough money to be of interest to a Japanese company, they'd need to sell the content.

This is nothing new - just another proprietary media. Except for the focus on comics - which makes sense really, considering actual video would fill a flash cart quickly and all the text you could want is available through cell phones, which all Japanese people with GBAs would own anyway.

Don't worry, the chance of this format making it to the west, where comics are for the young and the social outcasts, are slim.

Re:Cost?

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

You state the need for a charge like it is a sure thing. The linked article is short on details but the possibility that this could be driven by ads is a possibility. Since I don't live in Japan, I'm not in a position to comment on the market there but if Marvel or DC released a system like this, the reduction in printing costs could lead to a system much like network television - where advertisers are paying for the development of content and all the company has to deliver is mindshare.

I think comic strips are quite a different animal than the Famicom system you cite as evidence. It has always cost more to produce a video game than it is to produce a comic strip.

Re:Cost?

[arb]

You state the need for a charge like it is a sure thing. The linked article is short on details but the possibility that this could be driven by ads is a possibility. Since I don't live in Japan, I'm not in a position to comment on the market there but if Marvel or DC released a system like this, the reduction in printing costs could lead to a system much like network television - where advertisers are paying for the development of content and all the company has to deliver is mindshare.

Consider the "marvellous" revolution of e-books. Surely e-books also benefit from a reduction in printing and distribution costs, yet they cost almost as much as traditional, dead-tree books. (Aside: Maybe this is why e-books have not taken off yet?) While I grant that advertising might fund the distribution of these comics, I honestly doubt that the cost will be removed from the transaction completely. Even if advertisers are willing to pay the full cost of producing and distributing the content, if the content companies can squeeze a few extra yen out of the consumers they will do so. More profit is the aim after all.

I think comic strips are quite a different animal than the Famicom system you cite as evidence. It has always cost more to produce a video game than it is to produce a comic strip.

While that is definitely true, there is still a cost involved in producing the comic - ie, paying the writers/artists and distribution costs. Stores are not going to install download kiosks unless someone is paying for their presence. Who will pay for the network connections required to transmit the content? Who will pay to prepare the content in the first place. There are costs involved, even if they are lower than the costs involved in producing a video game. What this means is that the cost to the consumer will be much lower than a video game would cost, but the cost will most certainly still be there.

Re:Cost?

[bugbread]

Since I don't live in Japan, I'm not in a position to comment on the market there but if Marvel or DC released a system like this, the reduction in printing costs could lead to a system much like network television - where advertisers are paying for the development of content and all the company has to deliver is mindshare.

Hmm...I can't profess to say much about this particular situation, but I can give you a little background on the comic situation in Japan.

I believe that the printing costs for comics in Japan are much lower than in America, as all comics are in black and white, and they don't have to publish/stock 30 page comic every week, but a 200 page comic every 2 months or so. Witness the fact that, for example, the next New Xmen comic will be 32 pages and cost $3.95, while the new Gabachitare I bought a few days ago is 230 pages and costs $4.66.

I don't have any proof that comics cost less to make, but the anecdotal evidence seems to point at that conclusion.

Re:Cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

A better comparison would be the likes of Weekly Jump, which costs about 250 Yen ($2.30) for 500 pages. It contains one chapter of maybe 20 different series, and has a much bigger circulation than the compilation comic books you speak of. Most comics release a chapter every week in one of the big "phonebook mangas" like Jump, and then sell the compilation books of (maybe) 8 chapters that have already been released in the weekly magazines.

Re:Cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Comics might be a little hard to read on the GBA's small screen...but I've been having fun converting my own text docs to ebooks and flashing them to my GBA. Bookreader is a great e-book-making prog. Throw in Dante Advance (lets you type/edit text files on your GBA) and you have yourself a neat little PDA, except with better games :)

Re:Cost?

[bugbread]

Yeah, I debated whether or not to use the weekly multimags, but shied against it because: they're printed on super super cheap lowgrade recycled paper, they're intended to read and junked, and they contain a bunch of different comics. With a background like that, they're guaranteed to be cheaper than U.S. comics. I figured a compilation book would be the closest approximation I could give that would be fair.

But, as you can see, either way, we're talking much cheaper than the U.S. I don't know what the printing costs are, but if we look at the cost to the consumer per page, we've got:

• US Comic: 12.3 cents per page
• Japanese Compilation: 2.0 cents per page
• Japanese phonebook comic: 0.4 cents per page

If we assume that the cost to the consumer is tied in any way to the printing cost, it looks like saving printing costs would be a much smaller factor in Japan than it would in the U.S.

I like the idea, the GBA is underutilized

[curtisk]

..but the flash cart pricing will play a major factor here.The famicom disk system media was lil' floppy disks that weren't all that expensive

Note: It was the famicom(NES) that had disk games in vending machines, not Super Famicom(SNES) the only SFC disk "systems" were unlicensed add-ons that allowed game copying, backups and pirating

Re:I like the idea, the GBA is underutilized

[Anonymous Coward]

Why couldn't they just use compact flash cards like everyone else? It's not like Nintendo's based in China or anything.

Re:I like the idea, the GBA is underutilized

[lightspawn]

Why couldn't they just use compact flash cards like everyone else? It's not like Nintendo's based in China or anything.

Look at the console market. Nintendo is the only company with a non-standard disc format - and as it happens, the only one whose games can't be easily copied. In Any country.

Re:I like the idea, the GBA is underutilized

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the Gameboy and Super Nintendo had vending machines were you could write games to a flash cart, so the GBA thing isn't that new.

The service was called Nintendo Power and it ended back in 2002. AFAIK, there were some SFC games that were only available thru this service. Actually, the famicon disk rewrite service just ended a few years ago too.

akamichi

Re:I like the idea, the GBA is underutilized

[Anonymous Coward]

wow you're both idiots.
what the hell does the console market have to do with the gba market? gba games are pirated even easier than playstation.
and how the hell would they use compact flash cards in a gba?! cartridge slot, hello?!

Penny-Arcade

[MichaelGCD]

Penny Arcade is the first comic that comes to mind for this service...
It would be so awesome to read these especially:

1
2
3
4
5

Re:Penny-Arcade

[Anonymous Coward]

taco need to add a -1 karma whore along with the -1 not funny mod.

Flashcarts?

[fuzzybunny]

Are those the new exploding vehicles for the GameBoy Tux Racer port?

Doesn't quit hold true for the GBA

[SmallFurryCreature]

As it can first of be emulated resulting in every game being available. Emulators also exist for some PDA so you can still play on the move.

Second is that the rom images are tiny smaller then an mp3 song often wich makes it trivial to distro them.

Third is the fact that there exist a couple of flashcards for the gba that you can use to copy images too. This even results in you having ONE catridge with a dozen games and save games you can edit on the pc.

But most important is that GBA games are insanely priced. Although there are original games most are frankly based on tech perfect 10 years ago and more some being little more then direct copies. Nonetheless they cost the same as "full" console games.

This all makes the GBA's content one of the most copied in history. Gamecube != Gameboy. GBA just makes it far to economical too copy games.

Am I missing something?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Unless they are talking Garfield like comics, small square panels all the same size, how the hell is it going to fit?

Now the japanese also got strips like that, except theirs tend to four panels per strip and are vertical. These I could imagine being on a GBA screen. One panel at a time. Down and up to flip panels, left and right to flip strips.

Even then it would be hell to read the more wordy ones. There is a huge difference between watching an animation WITHOUT subs (japanese don't need their anime subbed :P ) and reading handdrawn text.

The more regular manga would be even harder as like in comics or strips there are no rules about the size of a panel. You could of course pan a large page on the gba screen but that sounds like a hazzle.

Pity there are no screenshots.

All this talk about movies, music, wireless play and now manga being squeezed on the GBA is making me think that there really would be a market for a far more powerfull device with a bigger screen that could do all this. At least in japan.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Unless they are talking Garfield like comics, small square panels all the same size, how the hell is it going to fit?"

They should publish PVP.

Re:Am I missing something?

[MegatronUK]

Shame the Japanese haven't taken up the GP32 (more powerful, bigger screen etc.) more readily then; it does all of that and more, on cheap smartmedia. The free image viewers out there scroll pretty big jpegs really smoothly, too - the screen quality is *excellent*. The commercial DivX player (all of $5) is brilliant and the wireless adaptor has been out for a while. So it's no Zodiac, but its small, compact, cheap, powerful and the software base is huge if you count the ability to easily port software other platforms (theres a gp32 sdl library, the official SDK for free, all the various arm-gcc gubbins...)... .. it's just a pity the 1st party s/w hasn't been that great... some spectacular looking titles seem to have fallen by the wayside. Linkage: http://joygp.entware.com (download commercial games and the great GPCinema divx player to your GP32) http://www.gp32x.com (news, demos, utilities) http://www.gbax.com (buy one!) http://www.lik-sang.com (buy one!) -John

Money fairies

[AllenChristopher]

"...the possibility that this could be driven by ads is a possibility."

As opposed to the possibility that it could be driven by ads being a chickensaurus?

I think they should make the cartridges really, really small, so we can use micropayments.

Re:Money fairies

[AllenChristopher]

What do you do when someone slips right in front of you? Sometimes you laugh. Falling can be funny. You're not saying "haha, you walk very badly, I walk much better than you." Everyone falls down sometimes.

Indeed, people who are incapable of walking without falling are not funny. They are sad.

The point of my post was the micropayments bit. Hence the subject "money fairies." A Penny Arcade reference usually works on /.

Relying on advertising to fund a new medium doesn't work very well anymore. There are too many advertisments out there, too much mindspace to control. It's as unreliable as micropayments.

There are ads in traditional comics... but comics aren't free. There are ads on cable TV... but cable TV is not free. There are ads on the bus stops... but the bus is not free.

There probably will be advertising in these comics, but you're still going to have to pay.

Re:Money fairies

[Anonymous Coward]

no, you were being a little bitch. shut the fuck up. if you had such vast ideas about micropayments in your original post, maybe i would have actually responded to you. but you had to nit-pick. i'd prove why you're wrong but you have shown to me that you are unworthy of my time. have a good day.

Awesome Technology!

[molafson]

Someone should clue them in to this awesome new technology I like to call "paper." It's cheap, plentiful, and highly portable. Also, the battery life is killer.

Re:Awesome Technology!

[UltimaL337Star]

ah! But can paper cause multiple seizures?

Is this big idea stolen from Big?

[wornst]

I wonder if Penny Marshall has anything to say about this concept. Maybe Josh Brolin will get some ip protection.

Seriously, what will 20th century fox have to say about this?