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.
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
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... !!!
That's like saying because independent films sell a fraction of the number of tickets that blockbusters sell, you should question their quality. Yes, there are plenty of sucky independent films, but there are plenty of good ones and sucky blockbusters as well. They draw different audiences.
You may be confusing quality of the game with quality of the marketing budget.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
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 grandparent obviously didn't read the Wired article about "the long tail." Just because a game/movie/album doesn't sell well, doesn't mean they aren't any good, it just means that hardly anyone has heard of them. Sure, alot of the low sellers aren't that great, but some are hidden gems waiting to be discovered. And everyone has a different opinion on what a good game/movie/album is so just because 10 people hate something 1 or 2 people might absolutely love it. Yet, with the current big budget blockbuster model of business you'd never get a chance to find those products.
To speak about independent games now, the article from GCA was nice but a little uninformed... The console guys do get a cut of the profits pie, but they also get an up-front licencing fee as well. If Nintendo were to do away with that licencing fee then maybe some shoe-string-budget games could start to appear on their console. However unless Nintendo required the indy game studios to sell their games through a proprietary virtual market or included some sort of horrendus DRM scheme, they wouldn't be able to really enforce any payments from these guys. I personally would perfer to see consoles become open standardized comodities, like DVD players for example, but I've ranted about that enough for a while I guess...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
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.
It was already done with Linux on the PS2, but it sucked because Linux itself burned up most of the PS2's ressources, and you needed to have Linux installed to run them on other machines. Let's hope Nintendo can pull something better.
Think of it this way:
Nintendo sets up an Indie Dev Program where an Indie Dev House presents a game concept to the company. The big N weeds out the pong clones, and leases/loans a dev kit to the worthy developer. The developer has to prove X amount of progress every so often (academic grants work this way), or they lose their dev kits.
As part of the lease terms, Nintendo gets the publishing rights. Since Nintendo has not invested any 'real' money, any projects that are not up to snuff just get dropped, and Nintendo hasn't really lost anything (increased hardware sales/market penetration taking up the program cost). But, if they find a real winner (e.g., Alien Hominid) they can publish away, making a fair chunk of change. Even if they only get mediocre titles out of the deal, they could publish "Indie Packs" with ~4 games per disk. Sell them for ~$15, and you could have run-away success stories (would you pay $15 for the next Bejeweled and 3 other games? I would).
Think about how cheaply this could be implemented. Nintendo could use a remote server to do all the compilation (i.e., IBM's on-demand stuff; think punch card submissions), making the dev kit nothing more than an emulator and document package (no progress, no access to the compilation servers, and no rogue hardware to worry about). To do your final testing, Nintendo burns a disk or two and ships them off to you. You verify that things look good, and submit 'final' code to Nintendo. If they decide to go ahead, they do their internal quality testing and then publish it. There are about four or five spots in that whole process where Nintendo can say, "Nope, forget it," and they cut their losses on that particular project.
I'll bet that the media they'll be using will be cheap as hell to press, even in small runs, which is the linch-pin in making this whole thing feasibile. This set-up might even work for the DS, since it's apparent that small runs of the carts are reasonably cheap as well (I'm basing this on the fact that the Zelda trailer was handed out on DS carts at E3).