Aaron Strife said:
I like to think Nintendo is cutting their first party release schedule back as a way of saying, we want third parties to make games and we want people to buy them.
frankly this is not a coherent position.
nothing in this industry is done in a vacuum. nintendo knows when games will release for their systems long before we do. they know when a lotcheck request comes in. they know when titles "go gold" and print orders are requested. and they know months and months before that process starts.
third parties, on the other hand, do not know when nintendo products are coming out substantially before we do. there is not a single person at EA that can confidently tell you nintendo's 2010 release calendar.
so given that third parties are substantially less able to plan around nintendo than nintendo is around third parties, why would the directionality of this be "nintendo leaves slots open -> third parties plan to put their games there"?
even wii games take at least a year to make. capcom is slating stuff for the end of CY 2010 internally. capcom does not know if nintendo is slating stuff for the end of CY 2010 internally. how on earth is capcom expected to capitalize on lulls in nintendo's schedule?
finally and most importantly, to what end would nintendo sacrifice or defer (IE sacrifice, given that there is a time-value of money at play here) revenue in order to placate a third party? even assuming this scheme works, why would they do it? to make partners take developing on their systems more seriously? to eventually make even more profit by recouping lost revenue through platform fees?
that's ridiculous.
some strategies that nintendo could try rather than hoping that third parties predict that they'll have a weak season: suspending or lowering platform fees, suspending, lowering, or altering print run info, allowing for lot check resubmissions at a discount or free, suspending or altering lot check requirements, copublishing, funding advertising campaigns, extra deployment of nintendo tech support, highlighting third party titles beyond the token highlights reel, letting third parties have sdks before the day before the public sees in the impact, releasing internal tech to third parties, consulting with third parties before releasing left-field hardware, letting third parties know when new hardware is about to negatively impact their selling plans, allow digital distribution publishers to set their own prices and change them at will, better patching mechanisms for both handheld and console... i mean, seriously, there is not a single third party in the world that would benefit more from nintendo delaying titles than it would from nintendo having a more generous and open platform policy broadly.
alternatively, if this
is nintendo's strategy, then fall 2008 should demonstrate that it doesn't work and they should change that strategy.
gerg said:
Can't you buy other games? Can't you simply *shock! horror!* not play games for a month or two? At the end of the day, you'll survive without. You did so last year, didn't you?
presumably he just happily played games on other platforms like the rest of us did, which i think is the essence of the complaint that most of us make about nintendo's conservative localization / release strategies as of late. i've got 7 platforms of which nintendo makes 2. if they drop the ball or don't pander to me, there are 5 other platforms that will, i guarantee you, whether it's fiscally responsible or not.
