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Cheap Games a Risk To the Industry, Says Nintendo President
Recent comments from Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime indicate that the company is worried about the effect of inexpensive mobile games on the industry.
"'Angry Birds is a great piece of experience,' he said, 'but that is one compared to thousands of other pieces of content that for one or two dollars I think create a mentality for the consumer that a piece of gaming content should only be $2.' Taking one last dig at the mobile competition, Fils-Aime added that he 'think[s] some of those games are actually overpriced at $1 or $2, but that's a different story.'"
While low-priced mobile games might not be good for Nintendo, it can still work out well for indie developers. 2DBoy, makers of World of Goo, released some statistics about launching the iPad version of the game.
It's hard to compete with value for money, isn't it Nintendo?
Disagree != mod troll.
Cheap games a risk to nintendo profits.
I'm so so so so so tired of being fed this crap by rich people that we need to prop them up in order to support industry and economies.
In related news, youtube is a threat to the television industry, and people who are so insolent as to make and release their own music for free are a threat to the music industry.
Planning/marketing departments of corporations are filled with mba grads who have been taught to shove a product to public from the maximum price they think they can pay. and hence, depending on their self-judgment, they decide what the selling price of any product should be. since all corporations employ the same mindset, all look to each other, adopt similar price points, and then start thinking that that is a correct price point.
products are produced/sold up to that point. more products are not produced and sold, because that would decrease the 'optimum' point. naturally, as a result, as you can understand too, the 'mass production/competition aspects of capitalism, goes out of the door.
what we are seeing here, is the retort of a corporate man, who is used to corporations determining the price points (even unknowingly) instead of public. had there not been internet, this industry would - if we take gaming for example - just continue forcing a 'reality' which says that a 'decent' game should be worth $40-60. thanks to internet, even if the industry doesnt want to, competition enters the scene. corporate world, naturally, is unable to understand or stomach the situation and is threatened.
however, while gamers can get competition thanks to internet, the situation is to the contrary in almost all other sectors, ranging from auto industry to healthcare. corporations are determining what gets sold from what price range, and because majority of the corps do it, after a time it becomes the 'industry norm'.
Read radical news here
Salute Sir, I am releasing a new game next week. In your honor I will price it at .99 cents, enjoy.
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We cannot compete with that! 2 bucks doesn't even cover the overhead for our beancounter and legal department that the games have to pull besides their own weight! Plus, state of the art graphics and animations are expensive, and since our games are hardly innovative in any way (seriously, usually we just improve graphics and increase the version counter), we cannot compete with games that rely on innovative gameplay and new, fresh ideas which are cheap but risky!
Is there some way we can outlaw those cheapskates?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Big corp. executive not happy with decline of prices, blames competitors.
When I read the headline I thought "Hmm good. Nintendo might be doing something about all the bad shovelware they grant a license to. Browse your local game store. For every Twilight Princess, Dead Space, and Super Mario Galaxy 2, there are dozens more cheap movie knock-offs littering the shelves like "Hannah Montana The Movie", "Pimp My Ride", and "Big Momma's House 2 -- Even Larger" Guess I was wrong.
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
For being so staunchly capitalist, big corporations sure hate the free market. Huh.
When an exec starts to talk about games as being a 'piece of experience', they've lost the point of it all and gone over to the dark side.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I don't know if you've seen what's on the app store, but it's not games which take risks. There's a 1000 variations on Angry Birds, Doodle Jump and Bejeweled. I wouldn't call something like Fruit Ninja a risky proposition in terms of game design. Fact is, you need a fairly decent budget in order to make some really compelling content. iPhone games are fun for anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours, but I've played a lot of iPhone games and none have come close to being a truly great gaming experience. Low budgets and really low priced games just mean that people will be making short arcade games that can be played for 30 seconds at a time and will have a limited number of characters, backgrounds and animations because that looks to be the golden ratio of where it's worth it for a developer to make a $.99 game and for it to sell enough copies to people who want a game to play on the toilet.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Big-name games that cost $10 million to develop and have $25 million marketing budgets aren't going to be $1 any time soon, the market just isn't large enough to sell 50 million+ copies, at any price. Only 50 million Xbox 360s have been sold, for reference.
The console makers set the licensing fee that publishers pay per disc, AFAIK it's a flat fee, so disc games will never be $1. Do you think Wal-Mart would bother stocking $1 games? They might set up a RedBox-style machine that spits out discs, but the shelf space used for the traditional route would no longer be feasible.
Publishers are running scared because they know the future is in digital distribution, and precedent is being set, while they're still on the fence twiddling their thumbs, for $1 games being the norm. This is problematic as $1 is a suboptimal price for many games, especially high-quality games with a massive advertising budget. The main reason it 'works' in the mobile phone space is due to the mechanics of toplists and how they're self-influencing. Console makers could halt this simply by eliminating the ability for end users to browse and download games via toplists. They could be replaced by alternative, possibly more complex lists.
For downloadable games with low (under $200k) budgets, it's alot iffier if a $1 standard is bad or not, as the market is definitely theoretically large enough to make it sustainable. When cellphones start coming out with analog sticks and buttons (like the PSP phone) and still have $1 games then I might start worrying.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Oh, the irony! It burns! Nintendo thinks cheap games are a risk to the industry? I guess that means the Wii is one of the biggest threats to the industry ever created.
backgrounds and animations because that looks to be the golden ratio of where it's worth it for a developer to make a $.99 game and for it to sell enough copies to people who want a game to play on the toilet.
Isn't that exactly where the money's at? People that work all day and have friends don't have time to play games except on the toilet... :(
Nintendo seems to have developed a pricing problem all of its own of late, which has nothing to do with $2 phone games. I'm pretty sure this has contributed to Nintendo's current profits slump, at a time when the company should be using its large installed base for the Wii to really rake off the cash.
The company just seems to have some really, really odd ideas of what a game should cost. It's most notable in the Wii's online store, where in the UK, direct, unmodified ports of 25 year old arcade games (many of which are hardly timeless classics) often tend to be priced in the £6-£8 range. Things are mildly better in the US, I believe, but the prices seem out of whack.
I absolutely don't want to hold up the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network Store as paragons of value for money, but they certainly offer a better deal than Nintendo's online shop (and have much more consumer-friendly terms of service as well, which link games to an account rather than a console). Compared to the classic game packs you can pick up on Steam and other PC services such as GOG, Nintendo's pricing looks positively extortionate. If Reggie wants to talk about games that would be over-priced at $2, he should look at the stuff like Exed Exes and Commando in his own online store - which he's trying to sell for four times that price.
Things aren't much better on the boxed-game front either. As we get further into this console generation, the general quality gap between Wii games and games for the other consoles and the PC is widening. There are a few honorable exceptions, but most of the Wii games released these days tend to feel short and shallow. And yet despite this, and despite their increasingly painful graphical shortcomings (with most Wii games still struggling to match the best the PS2 had to offer), the games tend to be priced at roughly the same level as games for other platforms (usually a few $ behind the PS3/360 games and a few $ above the PC games).
If I were Nintendo, faced with the dramatic profits slump they've seen, I'd be looking to boost volumes of sales by pitching more boxed games at the more realistic $30 (or £20 in the UK) price-point and slashing the prices of titles in the online store. If you sell more games, you keep people using their Wiis. And if you keep people using their Wiis, they will buy more games for it. Sony managed to achieve that virtuous circle on the PS2, but despite their installed base lead, Nintendo haven't managed it this generation.
However if your sole justification for charging 50-100 bucks per game is "oooh look at teh shiny!" and nothing else then kindly fucking die already.
cheers
gamers everywhere
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
What cost $15 in 1980 would cost $38.55 in 2009 thanx to inflation. http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
Thats the danger in this kind of pricing. Will someone pay $40 for a big game like Dragon Quest IX when they see ten thousand $2 games (9,995 of which are shallow crap)?
Making a big game with high production values is expensive. They're going to cost more then something really simplified.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Tuesday.
In fact, looking at this week's release list and reviews, it looks like three fun games came out for the DS this Tuesday.
YOU may not like them, but given the popularity of the franchises lots of other people must think they're fun.
Unfortunately, I don't think Atlas has the strength to shrug this time.
it wouldnt work, especially not for nintendo.
If you think apple is restrictive in what they allow into the app store, just think about what nintendo would require in terms of certification. Never mind licensing nintendo property like mario to third parties. Nintendo is very much about controlling the user experience on their consoles and keeping it family friendly, remember, the wii is succesfull because it has masses of family appeal with simple and colorfull games. And their own IP games generally also have a high level of quality. Allowing third party nobodies to make just about any game with mario in it would quickyl destroy nintendo's image
I agree with what you say. But then I remember Conker's Bad Fur Day for N64, and now I really don't know what Nintendo's image is supposed to be.
No, he doesn't. Those indie developers are, like it or not, part of the industry. If they're willling to eat rice for a year just because they'd rather code in their parents' basement than at a Nintendo cubicle, that's just fine. Their being inconvenient to Nintendo's sense of status quo is not a valid point. It's rather a symptom that the status quo might be changing. He's trying to say "we are the industry, their not", which is obviously crap.
Walmart sales bread. Does that mean that the little, bakery in the corner is not part of the "bread industry"? And of course you know that what the little bakery sales is fresher and tastier, while Walmart sales tons of shit labeled "bread".
I, for one, would rather have countless small companies such as www.introversion.co.uk than two or three big motherfuckers endlessly delivering the same rehashed games.
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
Even if it's true that the console game will give 40 times the value of the $1 mobile game, that can be seen as an enormous leap of faith to ask the consumer to make. What if I decide in the first 30 minutes I don't like the game? Can I take it back to Gamestop and get my money back? Fat chance. If I download a $1 game and decide I don't like it, then meh.
Considering how many $40 or $50 Wii games my kids have that never get played again, I can see how people can become leery of that model.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
This is just so off the wall I don't even.
Angry Birds is a simple concept with some great levels and compelling replay value. Would I pay $40 for it? No. However, conversely, I probably wouldn't pay even $2 for some of the "mini-game compilation" titles that have been released for the Wii (having been burned by one such abortion, priced at GB£15), nor would I pay $2 for any of the hastily hacked together "Dogz" clones for the DS. I love those platforms, but some of the crapware that's been released for them should give this man pause for thought before throwing around insults about "cheap" games.
There's a market for AAA US$40-50 titles and a market for US$1-10 casual/indie titles. These are two separate things, and complement each other. What he's probably worried about is that these $1-10 casual/indie titles will compete with similarly priced re-releases of 1st/2nd generation console titles on WiiWare/DS like Super Marios Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog, Ecco the Dolphin etc.. Now, do I really want to play Sonic on my Wii or do I want to try out VVVVVV or Chime or Clickr on PC?
Now, if you price your SDK and impose restrictions in such a way as to exclude or discourage casual, indie or hobbyist developers then don't be surprised when they turn to other platforms with lower barriers to entry...
Slashdot honestly doesn't seem to get content creation or business sometimes. By constantly lowering prices and conditioning customers to accept them, you actually stifle innovation and drive out businesses. In the bricks and mortar world this is what Wal-mart does, and they've managed to destroy and dominate markets while offering less overall quality and selection. For media, there is less barrier to entry, but the sheer number of crapware games competing at artificially low pricepoints are eventually going to start killing a lot of midrange developers as they simply can't make enough money in a reasonable timeframe. What the low price does is benefit AGGREGATORS not developers, who take a long tail approach and try and get tremendous amounts of content to make pennies on over time. And, of course there are no end of eager lemmings to help push themselves off the cliff. The low price points may make Apple and Steam rich, but not devs.
To make the situation fair, the small basement indie developer would not even be able to release his game on a Nintendo console, Nintendo gives only away devkits for their market if they are registered developers with an office and at least one game on their track record.
The most popular consoles always attract kiddie games and clones. This was also true for the PS2. The GameCube OTOH had an awesome ratio of decent games.
I think the main effect of the App store is simply that the light puzzle games that were previously quite profitable for the GameBoy are heading down market and will be sold for much less. So while Nintendo could make quite a profit on Sudoku and Picross games, in future they'll be $2 downloads on DSware.
Nintendo is the Apple of the gaming world, and they just ensured that a console version of Angry Birds will show up on the Xbox and PS3 downloadable market things. They like their own brand, they don't like opening it up to external developers, and they don't like following someone else's lead. Thank God, because if Nintendo made Angry Birds, it would be $40, have birds with Mii faces, and involve Mario or anime children or something. And be called "Flappy Bird Slingshot Adventures Party", or some s. And be a rail shooter.
Sorry, I'm a little bitter after buying a Wii and finding that, in exchange for no hard drive and crappy graphics, I got a controller that doesn't quite track motion accurately, a library of games suitable for a ten year old girl ("Say fellas, let's buy a case of beer and play Cooking Mama tonight!"), and a DVD drive that doesn't play DVDs, but does sound like a tiny gnome is attempting to cut his way free with a miniature Sawzall. I exaggerate, but not too much.
What's especially bizarre about Fils-Aime's statement is that the Wii Market channel carries an s-ton of casual games in the $5-$15 range. Thanks to their scam "Nintendo points" purchasing system (similar to Microsoft's Live point system), you can't get a game for anywhere between free and $5, but most people buying games via the Wii would have no problem dropping $5 on an Angry Birds-type title.
Frankly, there are some pretty terrible games for download that cost more than $5 for the Wii; for that matter, there are some pretty horrible games on disc for the Wii that are well in excess of that price. I doubt highly that the availability of cheap games on mobile phones will make an appreciable dent in Nintendo's market share, although Fils-Aime is more than welcome to suggest that consumers ought to be paying $25 a pop for games on a mobile phone. Preferably during an outdoor press conference after handing overripe tomatoes to the spectators.
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I agree with what you say. But then I remember Conker's Bad Fur Day for N64, and now I really don't know what Nintendo's image is supposed to be.
Bad Fur Day was done by Rare, not Nintendo itself. Rare also did Donkey Kong Country for the SNES, but Conker isn't a Nintendo character.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
In further news, home fucking is killing prostitution.
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Unfortunately, mostly really bad games --- there're some titles on WiiWare which are worth the download time, but not one of them IMO is an iPhone game port.
Moreover, if I were Nintendo, I'd require that companies release a demo of _every_ WiiWare title.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.