The Wii is always doomed, always! Especially compared to the other consoles that sell half as much and lose money while the Wii is making record profits!
You missed the point. Games have significantly higher retail prices than movies despite not being made on larger budgets. What does drive the price of games up is their limited appeal, many more people buy DVDs than videogames.
Being a bit smarter about what to make, how much to allocate to it and how to maintain your brand image (i.e. don't release overhyped garbage with your name attached, people remember that) can greatly reduce the number and impact of the money losers. Companies like EA seem to produce a lot of loser games while e.g. Nintendo hardly incurs losses from any game. With enough skill you can predict what's going to sell and what's not so you can cut the unprofitable projects before they're done. Inept managers instead cut stuff that doesn't fit some simple pattern and end up with a lot of stinkers (new ideas are not always risky, it's riskier to take a massive incumbent head-on than to try something new because fighting a massive incumbent requires massive investments and failure means massive losses but not every new idea is worth anything either).
But we're reaching the limits of those dev costs, while the cost increases exponentially the value for the customer just approaches the optimum asymptotically. Many of these investments produce results that do nothing to increase the value to the customer and thus could have been cut, producing a cheaper game that still has the same appeal to the customer.
Besides, the retail price has nothing to do with fixed costs like dev costs anyway, it's just to maximize profits and with its stagnating customer base HD gaming needs to increase prices to see growth.
What I buy is not a great score, great FMVs, great graphics, etc, what I buy is entertainment. There may be a lot of technical content in a game but if all that effort produces just a 4 hour experience that's the same as every other game (including the ones for 10$ in the bargain bin) that's not a lot of value for me. If it produces an 80 hour game that bores me to death within 4 that's not a great value either. On the other hand a cheaply made game that lasts 3 hours per playthrough and costs only a tenner or so while providing great fun and surprises in that time, well, that's way more value than any epic cinematics can produce.
In Europe prices go above or below 100USD depending on the currency fluctuations. Today it's above. To be fair Wii and PC games are significantly cheaper (73 USD today).
And they're going to lose sales over that. The customer decides where the market goes, not the companies and there's a lot of evidence that even the silent majority isn't going to accept this whole digital distribution crap.
I remember friends raiving about it for months like it was going to be the second coming of Jesus.
I've noticed that more and more games get hyped up to that level. Maybe that's what the industry is producing now, hype. Once the hype wears off the game's value hits rock bottom and you can get it everywhere for cheap. There's got to be SOME reason why the dirt cheap games don't destroy the market for 60$ games.
Games cost 60$ (70€) because had they remained at 50$ (60€) the publishers would not have been able to show any growth to their shareholders. They keep making roughly the same games, appealing to the same audience and thus don't have any customer growth. In the past that was not an issue as the population was growing and despite appealing only to the same percentage of people (30% of households had a console, that number remained the same from the NES to the PS2) they got automatic growth. Now the population growth is slowing or even reversing in many countries so the number of customers is no longer increasing. In order to maintain revenue growth the publisher must wring more money out of the existing customers so they come up with higher prices, DLC and such while talking about the evils of piracy and used sales in a desperate attempt to explain to their shareholders that there are still growth opportunities that don't require changing the games themselves to appeal to new people.
Meanwhile Wii games stayed at 50$ (dropped to 50€) because the Wii can afford to do that, it's increasing the customer numbers drastically and selling to many households that were not interested in the games available before (at least the last few generations, they may actually have had 8 bit systems) so they don't have to wring more money out of each individual customer.
The sound of the SNES is so much better it isn't funny, the Megadrive's music tended to be samey and dull outside of a few standout titles while the SNES had some seriously great sound. The impact of sound on the overall experience should not be underestimated.
Having your parents buy a console for you? In my day we had to save up our own money to buy things like that. Wishing for a game for Christmas or birthday, sure, that's reasonable but a full system? Nope. Outside of those special occasions we had to scavenge the bargain bins and flea markets to get anything we could afford (admittedly flea markets were more useful in the cartridge days and definitely cheaper than GameStop).
Yes, and thats part of the problem. I don't want sequels to those games, I want games that are as innovative and interesting as those where back when they first game out.
Yet you decry them as casual games. What passed for a top of the line title 20 years ago would barely qualify as a flash game nowadays but the success of PopCap shows us that there is a HUGE number of people who don't want games to go beyond the complexity of those early games. It's much easier to create something new when you're working with fewer rules, the more rules you pile on the higher the chance that you're cribbing notes from what has been before and creating something that is mostly derivative.
If the horoscope channel ticked you off shouldn't you have complained about the weather channel back at launch? The Wii has the most useful non-gaming features IMO, quickly booting the thing up to check the weather predictions is always convenient.
The issue is that unless the graphics are truly a deal breaker for a significant number of people there's no real need to improve them. Sure, better graphics are always appreciated but that's not enough to warrant the massive investments that increased graphics require (especially during game development which is over the lifetime of the system going to eat several times as much as developing the hardware did).
I'm surprised it took people this long to start complaining about the items, I haven't liked a Mario Kart since the SNES game because the items just got too overpowering after that.
Excite truck was $50 used (it's not available new) but it is a fun game. It sure would have been nice if they finished it rather than releasing a tech demo.
IMO it was finished enough but then again I bought it when it was 30€ new so maybe my expectations are lower. They did expand on it and create Excite Bots which is supposedly awesome.
Yeah, the game is notorious for publisher meddling, originally it was supposed to play in some eastern European country that's being integrated into the USSR and the player being a revolutionary against them but the publisher thought Americans can't relate with that so it was set in the US instead.
Generally communists as bad guys are pretty common in videogames and Tom Clancy books.
Slashdot Mirror
It's already happening to the DS, especially the DSi.
The Wii is always doomed, always! Especially compared to the other consoles that sell half as much and lose money while the Wii is making record profits!
I still haven't seen a game that's worth 70€ though.
You missed the point. Games have significantly higher retail prices than movies despite not being made on larger budgets. What does drive the price of games up is their limited appeal, many more people buy DVDs than videogames.
Being a bit smarter about what to make, how much to allocate to it and how to maintain your brand image (i.e. don't release overhyped garbage with your name attached, people remember that) can greatly reduce the number and impact of the money losers. Companies like EA seem to produce a lot of loser games while e.g. Nintendo hardly incurs losses from any game. With enough skill you can predict what's going to sell and what's not so you can cut the unprofitable projects before they're done. Inept managers instead cut stuff that doesn't fit some simple pattern and end up with a lot of stinkers (new ideas are not always risky, it's riskier to take a massive incumbent head-on than to try something new because fighting a massive incumbent requires massive investments and failure means massive losses but not every new idea is worth anything either).
But we're reaching the limits of those dev costs, while the cost increases exponentially the value for the customer just approaches the optimum asymptotically. Many of these investments produce results that do nothing to increase the value to the customer and thus could have been cut, producing a cheaper game that still has the same appeal to the customer.
Besides, the retail price has nothing to do with fixed costs like dev costs anyway, it's just to maximize profits and with its stagnating customer base HD gaming needs to increase prices to see growth.
What I buy is not a great score, great FMVs, great graphics, etc, what I buy is entertainment. There may be a lot of technical content in a game but if all that effort produces just a 4 hour experience that's the same as every other game (including the ones for 10$ in the bargain bin) that's not a lot of value for me. If it produces an 80 hour game that bores me to death within 4 that's not a great value either. On the other hand a cheaply made game that lasts 3 hours per playthrough and costs only a tenner or so while providing great fun and surprises in that time, well, that's way more value than any epic cinematics can produce.
I wish one of their requirements was making the text readable without eyestrain even at SD resolutions.
In Europe prices go above or below 100USD depending on the currency fluctuations. Today it's above. To be fair Wii and PC games are significantly cheaper (73 USD today).
And they're going to lose sales over that. The customer decides where the market goes, not the companies and there's a lot of evidence that even the silent majority isn't going to accept this whole digital distribution crap.
I remember friends raiving about it for months like it was going to be the second coming of Jesus.
I've noticed that more and more games get hyped up to that level. Maybe that's what the industry is producing now, hype. Once the hype wears off the game's value hits rock bottom and you can get it everywhere for cheap. There's got to be SOME reason why the dirt cheap games don't destroy the market for 60$ games.
Just for comparison, what are rental prices and times for where you live? In my town it's 1.50€ per day.
Games cost 60$ (70€) because had they remained at 50$ (60€) the publishers would not have been able to show any growth to their shareholders. They keep making roughly the same games, appealing to the same audience and thus don't have any customer growth. In the past that was not an issue as the population was growing and despite appealing only to the same percentage of people (30% of households had a console, that number remained the same from the NES to the PS2) they got automatic growth. Now the population growth is slowing or even reversing in many countries so the number of customers is no longer increasing. In order to maintain revenue growth the publisher must wring more money out of the existing customers so they come up with higher prices, DLC and such while talking about the evils of piracy and used sales in a desperate attempt to explain to their shareholders that there are still growth opportunities that don't require changing the games themselves to appeal to new people.
Meanwhile Wii games stayed at 50$ (dropped to 50€) because the Wii can afford to do that, it's increasing the customer numbers drastically and selling to many households that were not interested in the games available before (at least the last few generations, they may actually have had 8 bit systems) so they don't have to wring more money out of each individual customer.
Did you try Wii Sports? Some people liken the Wii's "casual" games to the arcade games of the old days.
Until you can punch someone over the internet I don't think you'd want to play Mario coop online.
The sound of the SNES is so much better it isn't funny, the Megadrive's music tended to be samey and dull outside of a few standout titles while the SNES had some seriously great sound. The impact of sound on the overall experience should not be underestimated.
Having your parents buy a console for you? In my day we had to save up our own money to buy things like that. Wishing for a game for Christmas or birthday, sure, that's reasonable but a full system? Nope. Outside of those special occasions we had to scavenge the bargain bins and flea markets to get anything we could afford (admittedly flea markets were more useful in the cartridge days and definitely cheaper than GameStop).
Yes, and thats part of the problem. I don't want sequels to those games, I want games that are as innovative and interesting as those where back when they first game out.
Yet you decry them as casual games. What passed for a top of the line title 20 years ago would barely qualify as a flash game nowadays but the success of PopCap shows us that there is a HUGE number of people who don't want games to go beyond the complexity of those early games. It's much easier to create something new when you're working with fewer rules, the more rules you pile on the higher the chance that you're cribbing notes from what has been before and creating something that is mostly derivative.
If the horoscope channel ticked you off shouldn't you have complained about the weather channel back at launch? The Wii has the most useful non-gaming features IMO, quickly booting the thing up to check the weather predictions is always convenient.
The issue is that unless the graphics are truly a deal breaker for a significant number of people there's no real need to improve them. Sure, better graphics are always appreciated but that's not enough to warrant the massive investments that increased graphics require (especially during game development which is over the lifetime of the system going to eat several times as much as developing the hardware did).
I'm surprised it took people this long to start complaining about the items, I haven't liked a Mario Kart since the SNES game because the items just got too overpowering after that.
Excite truck was $50 used (it's not available new) but it is a fun game. It sure would have been nice if they finished it rather than releasing a tech demo.
IMO it was finished enough but then again I bought it when it was 30€ new so maybe my expectations are lower. They did expand on it and create Excite Bots which is supposedly awesome.
The Nazi swastika looks different from a Buddhist swastika, especially when it comes with the whole red background and white circle deal.
Flags seem somewhat common in garden colonies here, not so much on buildings.
Yeah, the game is notorious for publisher meddling, originally it was supposed to play in some eastern European country that's being integrated into the USSR and the player being a revolutionary against them but the publisher thought Americans can't relate with that so it was set in the US instead.
Generally communists as bad guys are pretty common in videogames and Tom Clancy books.