60 Day Gamecube Development Contest

An anonymous reader writes "The site Cubehacker.com, a GC development page, is hosting a 60 day development competition. The goal of this competition is to boost interest in developing homebrew applications and games for this powerful little console."

Comments

Re:OK

[Boglin]

There are economic and historical reasons why Nintendo will never do this. As is well documented, Nintendo's main source of income isn't hardware sales, but licenses to use the platform. It's completely true that Nintendo would have more developers and probably sell a lot more units due to all the cheap games available. It's also completely true that AT&T could become the number one cellular provider by not charging for service; it's just economic suicide.

The other problem is a matter of history and personal bias, so it may not be as certain as the economic issues. The big video game crash that killed the Atari, Intellivision, et al. was partially brought about by the fact that anyone who wanted to make a game could do it - even if they had bad ideas. The market was flooded with thousands of crappy games and it was difficult to find the true gems amongst the garbage. When Nintendo released the NES, the wanted to avoid those same mistakes and put restriction on what could be released for their platform. While the most famous examples are the company's notorious censorship, they also had debugging requirements. They even put a limit that you couldn't release more than six games a year. The result was that Nintendo flourished where others had fallen. Now, you could argue that modern games require such vast resources that the shovelware of yore is no longer an issue. However, considering that licensing was one of the ideas that brought the company to the power it has today, they aren't going to abandon it until after the ship has already sunk.

If you're not good enough for the Cube

[tepples]

The problem with a GameCube competition is that the standard of production quality on a system with 3D capability is often too high for a project produced by an individual. That's why there's the PDROMS competition designed for simpler systems such as the NES, Game Gear, Genesis, Game Boy Advance, etc., where an individual project could still compete.