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Official bitching about Hudson abandoning VC support. [VC/WiiWare = lost cause]
- Thread starter Kobun Heat
- Start date
Gigglepoo said:
On the plus side I think third parties appreciate their games getting a week or so of exposure before next week's big release comes out. If 3rd parties are happy, there will be more VC games to be had.
And Nintendo certainly could have hogged a larger share of the VC piece had they released Mario World, Mario 3, Zelda 3, Super Metroid or any number of other must have classic titles in their library.
Still though, a nicer more well rounded list would have been nice. Entries from Konami and Capcom are notciably missing in the NA vc launch list. perhaps the games just won't be ready in time until Dec 2 or perhaps Konami and Capcom refuses to let foreigners play their VC before their own citizens? who knows.
soul creator
Member
charlequin said:
so just out of curiosity, wouldn't a special "Games of the Week" section every monday or something like that still accomplish the task of giving games their time to shine, while pleasing the people who know exactly what they want from the beginning?
I guess another thing is that I'm not seeing that there's a huge development effort required in getting most games onto the VC. Emulating an NES game and not adding any new features to the game doesn't seem like it'd be a huge development risk, so needing big sales right off the bat as if they were releasing a retail game is a bit strange to me.
Duane Cunningham
Member
I really think they should release the European Genesis (Mega Drive) version of Zero Wing. A ton of people would buy it just to hear the "All your base" speech.
Father_Mike
Member
Duane Cunningham said:
I know i would.
charlequin
Banned
soul creator said:
It'd be helpful, but no, not to the same degree. The big issue is that games are constantly being released across numerous different platforms. If gamers want to keep up with all of them, they've got to budget for the releases they're interested in. If a game can't squeeze into the budget, a lot of the time it gets forgotten completely as new desirable games come out to use up the buyer's current budget.
With new releases every week, you'll see a lot of people looking to see what's new and buying it on impulse -- or people who buy a $20 wii points card each month and spend it over the next few weeks on new releases, or whatever.
You can tell me that it's irrational, and I'll agree with you, but it's how people happen to work. Those who want to dive right in and have whatever weird thing they're looking for already available will be taken care of by like 2009, so.
It's not just a matter of straight-up development effort, but also of opportunity cost. Putting games on VC may mean not putting them on XBLA/PSS or retro compilations, or different royalty rates for doing so, or whatever. If VC dumped everything in the first day and that resulted in crappy or zero sales for many games, and those same companies held off on XBLA releases to put the games on VC, those developers would be pretty unhappy.
soul creator
Member
charlequin said:
I guess that's why I don't get it :lol
Seriously though, I guess I'm just projecting my personal buying habits. I suppose I just figured more VC users would be similar to me. The idea of someone having to budget for old NES/SNES games is kinda strange to me (which I guess is another argument against the somewhat high pricing levels), since it seems like they would all be impulse purchases for someone on a nostalgia kick, not competing with retail releases. Their primary time to shine was years ago when the games were first released, and downloads now would be "gravy" so to speak.
As far as your last paragraph, I could sorta see that for third parties...but I doubt we'd see Nintendo games on XBLA/PSS so all the contract/legal issues shouldn't apply to them
But anyways, like you said, I guess the initial idea I had of the wii having "ultimate backwards compatibility" is gonna have to be delayed for a few years...
in the meantime, ebay ftw
Kobun Heat
Member
I agree that, all other things being equal, they've sold more copies of Solomon's Key than they would have if there were a hundred games at launch.
However, that's all other things being equal. Which they most certainly would not be.
I absolutely disagree with the notion that what they're doing now is best for business and that the alternative proposal of just getting everything online is some kind of unreachable gamer pipe dream.
Quite to the contrary: from a business standpoint, they absolutely should get as much of the catalog as possible online as fast as possible. Video games are music tracks are books; it works for iTunes and it works for Amazon and it will work for Nintendo.
There is effectively zero risk involved. Risk is why retail game releases are spread out. There can only be a few games out at once because they need to make a certain amount of money back on each. With Virtual Console, what would happen if Solomon's Key sold zero copies? Zero copies. I'll tell you: nothing. Nothing bad would happen. In fact, Tecmo would probably be happier with a catalog-dump approach to VC, because right now they'd have sold a few thousand copies each of every Ninja Gaiden game, not to mention Tecmo Bowl.
Eventually, Wii won't be sold out everywhere, and Nintendo will have to actively attempt to move more units. By putting a broad and deep catalog of content online as soon as possible, they can only attract more users and sooner.
Read more.
However, that's all other things being equal. Which they most certainly would not be.
I absolutely disagree with the notion that what they're doing now is best for business and that the alternative proposal of just getting everything online is some kind of unreachable gamer pipe dream.
Quite to the contrary: from a business standpoint, they absolutely should get as much of the catalog as possible online as fast as possible. Video games are music tracks are books; it works for iTunes and it works for Amazon and it will work for Nintendo.
There is effectively zero risk involved. Risk is why retail game releases are spread out. There can only be a few games out at once because they need to make a certain amount of money back on each. With Virtual Console, what would happen if Solomon's Key sold zero copies? Zero copies. I'll tell you: nothing. Nothing bad would happen. In fact, Tecmo would probably be happier with a catalog-dump approach to VC, because right now they'd have sold a few thousand copies each of every Ninja Gaiden game, not to mention Tecmo Bowl.
Eventually, Wii won't be sold out everywhere, and Nintendo will have to actively attempt to move more units. By putting a broad and deep catalog of content online as soon as possible, they can only attract more users and sooner.
Read more.
Gigglepoo said:
Gigglepoo said:
You just negated yourself.
You can't use the argument that no one will buy games if there's too many and then say you're waiting until next year to buy said game.
If those games all came out at once, why can't other people wait to buy some of them also?
soul creator
Member
ahh, I finally got some backup :lol
perplexcity said:
Very true
However, we're talking about a very small sample of games now. If there were 100 games available, people would download the BIG titles but the games they don't know, the games they ignored 20 years ago, would still be ignored. I really don't think people would care about Solomon's Key if it was just one of a hundred titles on the VC. I'm not a business person, though, so I have no idea. I just hope they add some online play in Super Mario Kart.
Roland Stiles
Member
If you buy Wii Point cards at retail you have to pay sales tax, and that makes it more expensive than online--where there is no tax.
soul creator
Member
and while I'm complaining, add some sort of timed demo feature for every game. Like 5-10 minutes or something. For most 8/16-bit games, that's more than enough time to judge if you want to keep it or not. That would do more for game sales than spacing out releases, imo.
Kobun Heat
Member
I feel like I've been beating this point to death, so I'm just glad somebody else is willing to go to bat for long tail.soul creator said:
soul creator
Member
Roland Stiles said:
actually, there is tax when you buy points through the Wii. Dunno if it differs depending on location though...that's possibly why they ask you to put in a County when filling out credit card information. Although it does seem weird to be taxed for something as "fake" as points...
Kobun Heat said:
But isn't the bigger concern at the moment that not every 3rd party is on board yet for VC releases? If Nintendo can post huge numbers for not only huge titles but also niche titles, won't that motivate more 3rd parties to put their stuff on VC?
Also, I think that while each week's releases generate a lot of excitement (as they do now), it makes to release the games in this fashion. Now, if the Wii userbase was already > 10 million, throwing everything out there might be a better option, but right now there are fewer than 2 million Wiis being used and there's plenty of incentive for that user base to grow regardless of VC. Why not wait until the userbase is bigger to drop the bomb of a huge catalog?
Kobun Heat
Member
Unison said:
Not at all. If they opened it up to as much content as possible right off the bat, that would be even more appealing to third parties, as they wouldn't have to make the case for why one of their titles should be slotted into that miniscule little ten-games-a-month allotment.
Also, what third parties aren't on board yet? They showed a pretty extensive list of content partners for Japan.
Why not use the incentive of a huge catalog to grow the user base?
soul creator
Member
" MC-NINTENDO WII POINTS 800-255-3700 -$10.83"
*shakes fist*
also, the reason I mentioned the County earlier is because I noticed this is actually the normal 8.25% sales tax I normally pay for things here (cedar hill, near dallas, tx.). Arlington, about 20 minutes away in a different county, has a 7.25% tax.
So does that mean the county is actually getting money for online purchases? wha?
*shakes fist*
also, the reason I mentioned the County earlier is because I noticed this is actually the normal 8.25% sales tax I normally pay for things here (cedar hill, near dallas, tx.). Arlington, about 20 minutes away in a different county, has a 7.25% tax.
So does that mean the county is actually getting money for online purchases? wha?