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Nintendo's Iwata Skeptical of In-Game Ads, Episodes
Next Generation reports that Nintendo President Iwata has expressed skepticism about the benefits of in-game advertising and episodic content. From the article: "He added, 'Asking customers to pay something monthly, or something periodically, we can never expect that kind of revenue to become the significant, main resources for Nintendo.' Despite Nintendo's adherence to disruptive-thinking, the company is clearly wedded to the concept of up-front single payments for product as its main revenue source."
ok nintendo really looks like it gets it. Lets see, innovatinv gameplay, fun games, cheap console, free online service, no episodic content, no in game ads.
sounds too good to be true. But it is.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
You know, I might be the only one to feel this way, but I am glad that Nintendo isn't planning on monthly payments to leech money out of its victim ... er ... consumer.
I definitely agree with your sentiments. When a company sells a product under cost, hoping to "get it back" through some gimmick down the line, I get very suspicious. It's the kind of strategy that could lead to them suing customers to "get back revenue" the customer stole, by, e.g., disabling ads or something. When their costs are covered up front, it's much less likely that they'll try something evil. (It's for the same reason that you should have been suspicious of cyber-rebate.com's overpriced items that it would, they promise, refund.) That's why I respect Nintendo's strategy of making money on the console itself, which it generally does for a while until third party support is reliably bringing in enough.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Yes, but if you were selling software, which would be a safer bet? That your target audience would have $400 lying around, or that they would have $40 lying around plus an extra $13/month? Most people are far more likely to be able to put up the smaller monthly amounts.
You could put the $400 on a credit card and pay it off little by little. But assuming a 10% interest rate (VERY generous here, most are over 15%) and assuming you pay $40 the first month and $13 after that just like on the subscription plan, it would take you 32 months to pay it off, with $56 interest. Considering that not every person who plays a game is going to play it that long, and many people don't know when they start a game whether they'll be playing it that far in the future, it makes more sense for many people to have the monthly plan where they can cancel it if they need or want to rather than to buy it upfront and have to pay the full amount whether or not they still play it two years from now - and whether or not they can still afford it two years from now.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
It should start episodic, and it should be cheap. First episode is $10. Second is $10. Third is $10....
And of course they have to be worth that much (a decent amount of content). $10 is enough that I'm willing to risk it, unlike the $60 you have to pay for a normal game. None of this "our game is $60, and then each episode is $15 after that" stuff. Don't use episodic content as an excuse for not completing a full expansion pack.
I don't think we'll see this done right ever. But the idea is there. That's how I'd be willing to buy episodic content (in fact I would be more likely to buy because of the lower risk I'm willing to tolerate when a game costs $60).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The "gamer" demographic is not growing significantly in size and the games are getting more expensive to make. The apparent solution, in the eyes of Sony and Microsoft, and all of the developers who aim to produce cutting edge visuals with their games, is give people a relatively short game for $50-60, then squeeze them for a few extra dollars here and there by having them download new episodes, weapons, horse armor, levels, or whatever.
This is the price we're going to have to get used to paying for detailed graphics, because until we see some substantial breakthroughs in the way advanced graphics are produced, then I don't think things are going to change. The publishers have to maintain profitability somehow.
I've been hearing for the past 10 years from gamers that "gameplay is more important than graphics", but it's the graphics that have been driving the industry, for the most part. Nintendo is finally holding gamers to their word by saying "Okay, you wanted gameplay over graphics? Here you go." The fact that the Wii doesn't have all of the shaders, the memory, or the raw CPU/GPU power of its competitors means that developers don't have to invest all those resources in creating the most visually stunning games (unless they do it by employing a bold style that like Okami for the PS2) because there is no prayer of anything on the Wii looking as realistic as the most realistic games on the PS3.
The pressure to one-up the competition with graphics is gone on the Wii, leaving a focus on the quality (and quantity) of gameplay.
The Pokemon series is more about merchandising than it is about in game advertising.
If Pikachu (sp?) had to drink Red Bull constantly or lose it's power, then that would be in game advertising.
I like to compare Pokemon to Star Wars. George Lucas didn't make the bulk of his fortune off the movies, he made it off the merchandise.
I'm not saying it is right or wrong, good or evil. It is just a different topic.
I think it would be silly to expect people to pay per-game for old NES properties that are worth at most a buck each (when you take into account the lack of tangible media and the destruction of scarcity that the Virtual Console would cause). A subscription fee like Gametap uses would make a lot more sense.
Rob
Why is Nintendo the only sane console company this year?
According to Wikipedia, Mr. Iwata is a former programmer, game developer, and graphic artist -- in short, someone who most likely actually plays games instead of merely selling them.
Seems like he'd be in a good position to know what gamers really want. "If I were playing this, would I want to cough up $15/month for this? Hell no!"
More power to the gamer geeks!
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Super Monkey Ball.
That is Sega. If you want to make your case then pick an actual Nintendo game... like Pikmin 2. You collected small treasures like Duracell batteries and tins of Carwax. Honestly, I think of Pikmin 2 as product placement done right. It lends a familiarity that generic items couldn't adding, however slightly, to the experience.
I am curious. If Nintendo offers a reasonably priced console, standard priced games and free online playing, then who is going to be paying for the online services? I mean after all, there is bandwidth and infrastructure to be paid for at the content provider end. They don't need to be making a profit on the network play, but not making a loss is also important.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I have a couple of words for Nintendo:
Pokémon Red
Pokémon Blue
Pokémon Green
Pokémon Yellow
Pokémon Gold
Pokémon Silver
Pokémon Crystal
Pokémon Ruby
Pokémon Sapphire
Pokémon Emerald
Pokémon FireRed
Pokémon LeafGreen
Pokémon Colosseum
Pokémon XD
Pokémon Ranger
Pokémon Pinball
Pokémon Pinball: Ruby and Sapphire
Pokémon Diamond and Pearl
Pokémon Trozei
Pokémon Stadium
Pokémon Stadium 2
Pokémon Snap
Pokémon Dash
Mind you, this isn't over the entire history of the company. This is the last ten years. In the US, it's a Pokémon game, on average, every four months. And side from the occasional pinball or racing game, the games were popular not for new game mechanics but for new Pokémon (or as I call it, "new episodic content").
And no in-game advertising? The entire game is advertising... for itself! The pile of money made from the sales of Pokémon cards, carrying cases, movies, books, toys is enough to suffocate anyone.
Now... I'm actually a big Nintendo fan. A HUGE one. I even liked Pokémon to an extent (Pokémon Stadium 2 has great party games). But I have to call out someone on their BS, even if it's a Nintendo exec.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
If you read what he says, he's just saying he doesn't think it would be a significant part of their revenue. He doesn't say that Nintendo won't do ads or episodic content, just that the majority of their income will come from new games.
The fact that he didn't rule it out completely seems kind of significant.
The DS is another line of handhelds, nintendo has always claimed that the DS is not the next gen gameboy and that the next gen gameboy is due soon.
A few months back, in some obscure post, someone talked about the "Uncanny Valley", the place wherein trying to achieve realism, you get something that's ALMOST realistic, but because of its slight differences, is actually very disconcerting. It may be that games in this next generation may be approaching this area, which would be a total disaster for gaming companies. From what it looks like, Sony and MS have staked their systems livelihoods on graphics that fall right in the middle of the Uncanny Valley. Nintendo, on the other hand, with it's attention on things other than UltraRealism(tm), may be sitting safely on the other side. As realistic as the graphics look like they may be on the PS3, I would never mistake them for motion picture footage. Even with massive render farms, computer graphics have only just begun to fool the brain into thinking their looking at movie footage in the last 4 years or so, it will take real-time rendering quite a while to do that and safely climb out of the valley, MAYBE by the next generation, but I'm not even betting on it. Two generations from now, we'll see.
Nintendo has done something very intelligent over the years, by staking the bulk of their titles on purposefully unrealisticly styled graphics: no matter how good the graphics of a game get, the game next year will make the current game look "old" and somewhat less playable. Other entertainment and art forms aren't so starkly "now" and "then". When I go down to the local movie rental house, I'm probably just as likely to pick out a movie from the 1960s as I am to pick out one that came out last year, and the same goes for music: Beatles albums still sell. There may come a time when a great game will sell, steadily, for many decades. When I look back, I'm probably just as likely to replay Zelda: Ocarina of Time as Wind Waker, in fact, I still haven't decided which game APPEARS more contemporary, they're just different. However, the choice between Quake 2 and Halo 2 becomes much more apparent. In a year and a half, Halo 3 and the next generation of FPSs will obscure Halo 2, and Halo 2s sales will immediately cease. Gameplay, dialog, storyline, these things are practically ageless, and thus have much longer market value.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.