Slashdot Mirror
The Revolution Is In The Games
Dark Paladin writes "There's an interesting article over at Advanced Media Network regarding discussing how the upcoming Nintendo Revolution's ability to let players play old games and more independent developers gain access to mainstream gamers could take advantage of the Long tail approach of Internet business." From the article: "Imagine how many would-be developers that are now working on independent games, games that sell maybe only a few thousand copies online, unable to break into the console market. But if Nintendo is right, and offers maybe an inexpensive (or free, which would be better) development system for would be game makers, the field could shift. Now, they don't need to rely on that one Legend of Zelda game to sell 5,000,000 copies to be a success - they could have 1,000 developers all making microbudget games that only sell 5,000 copies each (a pittance in the game development world) and still be considered successful."
When the revolution comes, the PS3 and XBOX 360 will be the first against the wall.
- -- Truth addict for life.
Yes, but, if they finally do have access to this great money making market, and most of them still only sell 5,000 copies, perhaps that sheds some light on the quality of the games. That's not to say a small-time developer can't make a great game, I've seen plenty, but that also doesn't mean every small-time developer CAN make a great game. So in the end, the consumer doesn't truely win. Only the game developer and Nintendo.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
While its a cool idea, and the homebrew stuff on the dreamcast shows that people would be interested in it, it's just not going to happen. How many companies supported having random people producing games for their console? Will Nintendo be running quality control to make sure the console doesn't get bogged down with 50 versions of pong, all buggy? Will small developers get a break on the cost of licensing fees and devkits (where the console makers make a TON of money)?
I really like Nintendo's approach here. Who cares about having all that computational power if neither Sony nor Microsoft (admitably) don't seem to care much for the games that would use it, instead opting for a more general entertainment purpose? Certainly this would be a very attractive choice for independent game developers to boost their sales and popularity of their titles, but what about game developers that want to distribute their games not-for-profit? I've been working on my own free (as in beer), open-source game for nearly a year now. I'd love the idea of seeing it played on a next-gen console one day, but I still wouldn't want to make people pay to play it. Would Nintendo still charge a "minimal fee" for games distributed on the Revolution? Or would they allow an exception for developers who wish to create and distribute games free-of-charge?
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
That would be my response. As a sometimes indie game developer (when i feel like it), one of my issues has been: I have this xbox, and i *could* compile my game for the xbox, but youd need it to be modded (and then theres actual legal issues about having the xdk) for it to work. If i can port my game to the revolution, ill fricken do it in a minute. I like the casual gaming atmosphere consoles have VS the secluded nature of PC gaming anyway. But as an indie developer, theres not a whole lot of say i have (if i want to keep it free, i gotta keep my costs down, this means, no dev kits)
Anyone else think an inexpensive dev kit (maybe something that doesnt allow 100% access to all resources or something, so theres still a market for big third party developers) would be a great idea?
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
On a few older posts I have been saying that it would be great if a console maker released a SDK for everyone.
If Nentendo does this I will waiting in line to buy a Revolution.
Nintendo would HAVE to have quality control in place, and hand-pick what games become available. Otherwise i would imagine someone somewhere would end up writing a trojan horse or other destructive program disguised as a game (imagine perhaps one that erases all your game saves?)
That said, imagine the amount of staffing and time required to evaluate each and every crappy little home-brew submitted... !!!
For a commercial developer to sell 5000 copies of a game is woeful. Even if they had no expenses publishing and distributing the game, they aren't going to recoup the expense they put into making it.
Alternatively, there could be a rash of hobbyist games, same as there is for PC. If you like, you can download free games from the Net right now, which are graphically unimpressive and just plain crap.
How would that be good for the Nintendo Revolution?
Right - diddly/squat. 3000 games being trades, say every week, and Nintendo doesn't get a single red cent out of around $60,000 (or more!) being swapped about. [...]
Now, that $60,000 a week can go right into Nintendo's pocket, a good application of the long tail right there.
Sure, but how much of that will Nintendo have to pay for servers and their maintenance per week? These games have to be hosted, credit card (or equivalent) transactions have to be processed and there are many other expenses.
The 60 grand is not profit; it's gross income. My guess is that Nintendo wouldn't do it if it came at a loss, so they'll probably end up making some money, but not the 3 million the author talks about. Besides, three million is not a very insignificant figure if you look at their profits for one quarter. (Yes, it's a slightly dated article).
By offering the library of older titles, Nintendo simply adds another feature to their console. It's an enticing one, for sure, but it competes against consoles that offer other features (such as the ability to stream media). The features are just one aspect consumers consider when purchasing a system, and it looks like we'll have a nice choice this time around.
Obviously Nintendo could always change their minds, but based on the language I'm seeing in that article, they are more interested in using the classic games as leverage to get more consoles in homes. Offering free games does a much better job of this goal as you can market the machine as being capable of playing hundreds of games out of the box.
As for independent developers, I'm afraid that Nintendo's cryptic commentary at E3 and beyond has really opened the door for speculation for things that just aren't realistic yet. While it's nice to imagine that development kits could be free and that they would provide a vehicle for distributing these homebrewed low budget games, it just doesn't seem realistic at this point in the industry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there really hasn't been any solid evidence to suggest that Nintendo would ever go this far
Making it easier for smaller developers to contribute games (which is what I believe they meant) and opening up the flood gate of eager and willing independent developers are two entirely different things and I think that is where all of this speculation is coming from.
Sure, independent games may suck for the most part, but what about the prospects of educational software combined with low dev costs? How many schools would be able to customize software for (probably) a relatively small fee and a $200 system? There's a reason why the Sony dev kit is called a T-10k (think price here). Can't see public schools shelling out for one of those. And you can't buy a half decent computer for $200-ish.
Give it a while and Mario may be teaching your kids to count, spell, type, and hack into gov computers. OOOOO kids LOOK! Numbers...gotta catch'em all...and beat other players at it online as well.
The long tail is an artifact of selection bias. Online retailer biased journals like Wired work on the assumption that the collection of Amazon or iTMS is a complete library of everything people might want to buy. If that's not true, then the whole house comes crumbling down, and you basically are saying "everything Amazon bothers to sell moves at least one copy a month." Of course, Amazon is the master of pricing, and they will manipulate the price of anything growing stale quite well so that it does sell. Why might Amazon sell something at invoice plus internal costs? Because despite the author's arguments, even Amazon has limited space. On the other hand, iTMS doesn't have much control over price. I don't think they care to admit that they don't carry everything you could ever want, but if you asked a dead manager if iTMS ever dropped or didn't carry a song, the answer is probably "yes." In short, the long tail is the result of inventory control and discounting in a particular form of goods.
As for the Revolution, there are two scenarios. Either it's an open market operated by the benevolent souls at Nintendo, or there's a price barrier to entry. The first will pretty quickly denegrate into a bunch of free games made by people in their spare time as a form of artistry turned philanthopy. The other is far more likely, and the result will be a clash between Nintendo's quality guidelines and several small startup's desire to compete on price.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I think it's great the Nintendo is GOING TO DO, what the Phantom has been promising to do for what, like, three years now...bring internet downloadable console games to the masses. So now that Nintendo is FINALLY going online, I'm sure Sony and MS wish they wouldn't, because can they compete with a library of 100's of classic games that we all grew up with?
Nothing to see here now move along...
Hey didn't someone say you can run Windows on a PowerPC and Apple on an INTEL...
WTF is that all about!
Now, don't take the title as I'm against indie developers. As a matter of fact, I'm all for it.
But to not tarnish Nintendo's new flagship product by a bunch of poorly polished indie games, I don't think Nintendo will allow any random person to develop for the newest system itself. However, remember that the Nintendo Revolution is backwards compatible? Remember that Nintendo said it's also designed for the indie developers low on budget but big on ideas? Well, if you're an indie developer low on budget, you wouldn't need the power of the core Revolution (by core, I mean the most computationally powerful part of the Revolution). You'd only need, say, the N64 part. Or maybe even the GameCube part. That should more than suffice for indie developers trying to prove a concept (think Alien Hominin while still in the Flash stage). This way, Nintendo could offer NES/SNES/N64/GameCube dev kits for free (or some reasonably low cost), yet keep the core Revolution dev kits at industry prices. In addition, Nintendo could easily "promote" promising developers while still disassociating itself from poorly written games.
Furthermore, Nintendo could allow indie developers to host their own games and forcing them to offer the games for free. That way, Nintendo can't be blamed for allowing the sales for bad games, since whether or not these games are poorly written, they weren't "sold" in the first place. And if a game ends up being successful, Nintendo could buy/negotiate for the idea and (help) produce it for the core Revolution.
...they can just call them "Beta" and add to the manuals or online help: "Nintendo is not responsible for any damage caused to your system or television. Use of these immensely cool games will void your warranty and (in the case of some insane developers) give you an incurable epileptic seizure. Nintendo will not hear claims arising from the use of these Beta games, and mails requesting support for said games will be stamped with 'I told you so', 'Fuck off', or 'I have some good news--I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to GEICO', and returned to sender."
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
The moron thinks Nintendo's version of XBOX Live! acade is innovative?
This is actually starting to sound a lot like the Phantom console, except well thought-out. Fully polished and professional releases would be full price, available in stores. Smaller teams, who would still have to submit to some form of format QA, would be able to sell smaller titles cheaply the same way that cell phone game companies do. Gamers could go to the store and buy the new Zelda for 50 dollars, or on impulse in the living room could buy the original Zelda for 5. Or they could run out and buy Alien Hominid for 40 dollars, or download a Revolution version of the webgame at the cost of watching some ads. Maybe all of Nintendo's old games are available at the cost of watching a few ads while you play... between levels or at various other times. Perhaps any indie development firm will be able to setup such an arrangement, with Nintendo's traditional profit/risk sharing model.
If any of the above speculation is true, it sounds like Nintendo has finally embraced the network in a major way... perhaps even more so than Microsoft has, and certainly differently.
This generation of consoles is going to be interesting indeed. Controllers are wireless, consoles are wired.
The ______ Agenda
The only problem I see, is that the 512 mb of internal flash memory is too small for downloadable content.
If it's 512 Mb (megabits), then by some estimations it'd be too small. On the other hand, 512 MB (megabytes) is quite a lot. Remember that all of The Sims for Game Boy Advance fits into 16 MB (Urbz is 32 MB), Feel the Magic for Nintendo DS is 32 MB, and a semi-polished Tetris clone for GBA fits into 160 KB. And if you're willing to think back to NES-caliber games, none of the 8-bit Final Fantasy games was larger than 256 KB.
But, there's no free/open source software for the Revolution at the time of writing
There is GameCube software, and thanks to back-compatibility, any GameCube software is Revolution software. There is also homebrew GameCube software loaded through the Ethernet port and Phantasy Star Online.
Nintendo has a reputation. It wouldn't want to lose it over some source-forge class projects clogging up the Revolution user interface.
Frozen Bubble. StepMania. Scorched3D. BZFlag. Source ports of classic Id Software games. Are these all "SourceForge.net class"? Besides, even the "crappy" games wouldn't clog the user interface if they get the thumbs-down from enough players.
I would LOVE to just lounge back on the couch and burn through some time playing cool indy games - it just makes it more fun than playing them at my desk on one of my computers.
Give it a while and Mario may be teaching your kids to count, spell, type
You obviously don't remember Mario Teaches Typing (typing tutor) or Mario Is Missing! (geography game).
Before imagining all kinds of things into Nintendo's next console, let's think about the economics of this for a second:
That means that Nintendo will have to control/license everything available for download. They're probably not going to give the development kits away for free simply to make sure they won't have to review crap from wannabe-programmers who want to make a quick buck with their buggy Pac-Man-clone which, aside from being crappy, probably will get Nintendo sued by Namco.
Even if Nintendo allows independent developers to use its online service for distributing and selling software, it won't be the way most people expect it to be.
Just tried it, and it's meh. Nice graphics technically, but the weapons feel lame, the weapon effects look crap and the overall design isn't that nice... another OSS project that badly needs an art director.
worst to best
quake nexuiz quake 2 quake 3 UT99
with hypothetical good weapons
quake quake 2 nexuiz quake 3 UT99
What the hell, it was not. He cleary said that the "revolution" part hasn't been shown yet, and miyamoto (the great) has confirmed that the controller is the revolutionary part. What E3 confrence did you watch?
My guess is that Nintendo wouldn't do it if it came at a loss, so they'll probably end up making some money, but not the 3 million the author talks about. Besides, three million is not a very insignificant figure if you look at their profits for one quarter.
I think much more people would run old games on their consoles it they came as a really easy download.
They could show some trailers or screenshots or make a "classice game of the week" with a playable demo.
This way, many more than just a few geeks remembering their childhood days people would try out these games. And I think a few servers are much cheaper than packaging games and using retail stores.
I don't need a signature.
What a bunch of Nintendo bunk. Small independent game releaes on Nintendo Revolution. Sounds exactly what has been going on the in the PC game world as far back as the Apple ][ era.
Cross compiling old PC games for the XBox like quake and original Doom goes back as far as the first Xbox mod chip and leaked Xox SD kit. And there was original software also. Those nice ported emulators let me play all the old big N games that are coming to the Revolution.
If sanctioned my MS, this trend that Nintendo claims with small independent games will be on the Xbox360, not Nintendo.
I'm the AC who posted this.
In response to some of the replies... Also keep in mind Nintendo's image and the fact they would not want any porn or other such materials available. They WILL have to filter all submissions.
Because the Revolution is supposedly a lot less powerful than either the Xbox 360 or the PS3, it will cost a lot less to make. Nintendo can and will sell them at a lower price than the competition and still make a profit on every console they sell. Having the ability to download and play all of those old school games (even if Nintendo hardly makes any money on them) is just another way to get people to buy consoles where they make the big money.
the ON videos were real, that is the revolution
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I think that you are starting to hit the nail on the head. I think that Iwata's comments about the Revolution allowing games with the "best ideas, not the biggest buget" to succeed is a very important point to highlight. Nintendo has restated this point numerous times in regards to the system. In a way, this is most obviously speaking to developers. But I think it goes further.
During his keynote at the game developers conference and again at E3, Iwata made it a point to mention that his favorite part of the games is watching the faces and reactions of those playing his creation. This is an interesting and fun point, but it has resurfaced enough times to make me think that there is something more to it. I think that it plays right into the hands of the whole idea of amateur developers. The fun is making a game and having your friends play it. *shrug* I really doubt that nintendo will make this happen, but they hints are so obvious that it is impossible to ignore that it is a possibility.