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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."
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.
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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)?
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
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... !!!
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.
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.
Well, like you said....say there are no development costs? Say the team uses all free/open source software to develop their game with in their spare time... Then say there are only 6 guys who work on it... If their game sells for $30, and we'll say nintendo keeps a dollar out of that leaving them with just $29. That's $24,166.66 for each person if they were to split it evenly. That's a lot more than you would make in a year working at Walmart or McDonalds... Sure, it doesn't sound like much, and you'd probably need more than 6 developers...but if your game was worth half a sh*t, and there was a decent "long tail discovery" program you'd probably sell quite a few more copies than that too... It's more than feasable.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
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.
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