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Nintendo President Vows Cheap Games
Chris Morris, over at CNN's Game Over column, had a chance to talk to Nintendo President Iwata last week about that company's goals for their next generation console. The message Morris came away with: $60 games are not in Nintendo's plans. From the article: "If we can come up with an addictive, but simple title - such as Tetris 15 years ago - my attention should be focused on containing costs ... So, I would make it available through the Virtual Console. I think the opportunity for ourselves will be much larger than software that costs $50-$60. ... Of course, there are a number of people waiting for a 'masterpiece' title. For those games, we'll utilized traditional distribution channels."
Nintendo will have much of the old SNES and Sega Genesis catalog available for download. There's a lot of games out there that I didn't get to play the first time around. Heck, this would be a lot like the Phantom game console, only real.
While the summary doesn't make it immediately apparently, the article states that this is for more than the downloadable content:
Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo of Japan, told me last week that while the company has no control over what its partners ask for their games, "I cannot imagine any first party title could be priced for more than $50."
And one would assume that the industry would generally follow the lead of the publisher... generally.
For the most part, Nintendo has always strives to make game affordable. They were the first to offer "Best Of" games, those popular titles that sold over a million or more copies that they started to discount from their original price, usually in the $30 CDN range. But I ask, if you know your next Legend of Zelda is going to sell millions, why launch it with a $60 price tag?
Its not like Nintendo has to guess what will be a hit and what won't. A Zelda, Mario, Metroid, etc incarnation will always sell like hotcakes, so why not just offer them at a discount price to begin with.
I hope this isn't just all talk and no action, which has been very typical of Nintendo for the last 10 years. The Revolution name should be more then just a marketing gimmick. If it doesn't offer dramatically different game play, more features and lower costs then where is the Revolution except on the label. If its just another vehicle for more Pokemon and Mario and Zelda derivative titles, then I think Nintendo might be in big trouble.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Maybe not in that regard, but let's see the XBox run Mario or classic Zelda without using some illegal emu and roms that takes chips and crap to make it happen.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
A Zelda, Mario, Metroid, etc incarnation will always sell like hotcakes, so why not just offer them at a discount price to begin with.
Because if they were to do this, they wouldn't be Maximizing profit. You sell Zelda at the 50 dollar price point initially to customers like myself, who will whip out a check the second it comes out, and you keep it there, so that little billy has time to save up to buy the game at full retail price.
The only reason you drop prices is because after a year and a half, there is plenty of new hotness out there, and chances are, you will get lost in the full retail price shuffle. So you slap a distinctive yellow stripe on top of the box, slash the price to 20 bucks, and sell to everyone that "heard it was good from somewhere" but weren't willing to fork over $54.11 just to see if he would enjoy running around as an elf with a boomerang. You don't get as much profit, but you're making more money then you would selling 0 copies at $50.00.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
The thing in this interview I found most interesting were the details and hints at storage options. First, they flat out said that the Revolution will have a SD slot. Hopefully this will get away from the proprietary memeory cards of the past (or present). Second, Iwata said that there will be usb ports built in for practically andy storage method. So USB flash drives and external hard drives become an option. Sweet. I have to admit that the $400 price tag of the 360 is very off-putting. If Nintendo can keep the cost down by not including a HDD while still making one a practical expansion option, I'm all over it.