jarrod said:
I believe it's whole catalogues. Ben Judd said that when pressed about getting Bionic Commando on VC, and that they had no active involvement or control over what goes up.
I imagine Nintendo
tries for entire catalogues, but that it doesn't have to always be that way. Here's how I thought it works. Bear in mind, I'm nobody.
- Nintendo put together a squad from their army of on-call lawyers, and assigned them to find out who all owns the rights to to as many games from old Nintendo systems as is humanly possible.
- The legal team approaches rights-holders and offers them a pre-approved percentage for their entire library.
- The rights holder agrees, and gets no money upfront. The legal team passes the game rights and roms on to Nintendo. Non-disclosure agreements are also involved.
- Nintendo tests and adjusts the emulation. They also get the game ESRB rated, usually just prior to releasing it.
- Now IF Nintendo ever decides to make use of a game, they take care of all the hosting and support and publicity duties, and they give the rights holder their agreed-upon cut of the money taken in.
- Hudson, Sega, ect. bring their own respective systems to the table, and act in pretty much the same way Nintendo does, but obviously earn less money than Nintendo because Nintendo always gets a cut of everything. Nintendo also presumably has the final say in regulating the flow of titles from these other systems.
- Rights probably aren't given over to Nintendo for eternity, and rights holders might have some way to back out of the program if they reconsider, or if they just decide that they don't like the cut they're getting. Otherwise they could be screwed if something came up making a release potentially damaging, and they'd have to resort to begging Nintendo not to hurt them, which wouldn't be worth it if no money even traded hands in the first place. Such details are unlikely to be seen or discussed.
- First party games obviously earn Nintendo the most money, because they don't have to share the money with anybody.
- Every third party wants their entire catalogue up yesterday, that way they can get as much money as possible, but Nintendo doesn't care what third parties want, they try to manage the system in a way that will end up being the most profitable for Nintendo. Third party games are released and profits are managed in a way that attempts to keep fans interested and encourages/rewards strategic third party relationships with Nintendo.
- Nintendo and third parties both seem to be under the impression that WiiWare will be more profitable for them than the VC has been, and that the VC is unwanted competition and/or a distraction.
- Hudson pulling out (if they indeed have pulled out) may mean the end of TurboGrafx games on the VC, or Hudson-published games from Nintendo systems on the VC, or both. If Hudson can pull games, there's most likely a distinction between released and untouched VC games, but released VC games have been pulled from release before, so it wouldn't be unheard of, if they went that far.