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Nintendo Businesses Entertainment Games

The Revolution Is In The Games 93

Posted by Zonk from the power-to-the-devs dept.
Dark Paladin writes "There's an interesting article over at Advanced Media Network regarding discussing how the upcoming Nintendo Revolution's ability to let players play old games and more independent developers gain access to mainstream gamers could take advantage of the Long tail approach of Internet business." From the article: "Imagine how many would-be developers that are now working on independent games, games that sell maybe only a few thousand copies online, unable to break into the console market. But if Nintendo is right, and offers maybe an inexpensive (or free, which would be better) development system for would be game makers, the field could shift. Now, they don't need to rely on that one Legend of Zelda game to sell 5,000,000 copies to be a success - they could have 1,000 developers all making microbudget games that only sell 5,000 copies each (a pittance in the game development world) and still be considered successful."
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The Revolution Is In The Games More

The Revolution Is In The Games

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  • What was that phrase again? (Score:5, Funny)

    by doc modulo ( 568776 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @08:49PM (#12742622)
    When the revolution comes, the PS3 and XBOX 360 will be the first against the wall.

  • Yes, but... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sH4RD ( 749216 )
    Yes, but, if they finally do have access to this great money making market, and most of them still only sell 5,000 copies, perhaps that sheds some light on the quality of the games. That's not to say a small-time developer can't make a great game, I've seen plenty, but that also doesn't mean every small-time developer CAN make a great game. So in the end, the consumer doesn't truely win. Only the game developer and Nintendo.

    • Re:Yes, but... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Punboy ( 737239 )
      Except that this will open up much larger selection of games for people to choose from. Even if they aren't that whoopy, if the people who buy enjoy, the consumer /still wins/.

      • Re:Yes, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ZephyrXero ( 750822 ) <zephyrxero@yah[ ]com ['oo.' in gap]> on Monday June 06, 2005 @10:24PM (#12743187) Homepage Journal
        The grandparent obviously didn't read the Wired article about "the long tail." Just because a game/movie/album doesn't sell well, doesn't mean they aren't any good, it just means that hardly anyone has heard of them. Sure, alot of the low sellers aren't that great, but some are hidden gems waiting to be discovered. And everyone has a different opinion on what a good game/movie/album is so just because 10 people hate something 1 or 2 people might absolutely love it. Yet, with the current big budget blockbuster model of business you'd never get a chance to find those products.

        To speak about independent games now, the article from GCA was nice but a little uninformed... The console guys do get a cut of the profits pie, but they also get an up-front licencing fee as well. If Nintendo were to do away with that licencing fee then maybe some shoe-string-budget games could start to appear on their console. However unless Nintendo required the indy game studios to sell their games through a proprietary virtual market or included some sort of horrendus DRM scheme, they wouldn't be able to really enforce any payments from these guys. I personally would perfer to see consoles become open standardized comodities, like DVD players for example, but I've ranted about that enough for a while I guess...

    • Re:Yes, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Suddenly_Dead ( 656421 )
      Or the user who enjoys the likely niche-aimed game. And since there will be many of these, many users win.
    • Any time the consumer pays money and then gets something that is less in resale than they put out for it, they "lose". It's very rare for the consumer to "win" when buying things. I suppose if you could find a way to quantify people's enjoyment of a game, you could look at a different definition of "winning" for the consumer (I think this is the attempt behind how many hours of gameplay it takes to finish something, on average).
      • That's the worst definition of winning and losing in free-market transactions that I've ever heard.

        Here in the real world if you trade your money for something that you value more than the money you have "won" and the seller, who presumably valued the money more than the sales item, also "won" regardless of what the resale value of the item is.

        I suppose when you go shopping for food you feel you've gotten ripped off because after you eat it the resale value is literally shit.

        So long as the item is f

      • I think you need to take some macro or microeconomics classes. There is no "win" or "lose," there's only the laws of supply and demand.

        I came up with a pretty good scheme for economically justifying game purchases. Let's say as an example I make, after taxes, approximately $10 an hour. I usually then figure that if I buy a $50 game, I should enjoy it for at least 5 hours, since I spent 5 hours working in order to afford it. You can then add in the time I worked to buy the console or any other peripherals as

    • Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by porcupine8 ( 816071 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @09:52PM (#12742991) Journal
      Yes, but, if they finally do have access to this great money making market, and most of them still only sell 5,000 copies, perhaps that sheds some light on the quality of the games.

      That's like saying because independent films sell a fraction of the number of tickets that blockbusters sell, you should question their quality. Yes, there are plenty of sucky independent films, but there are plenty of good ones and sucky blockbusters as well. They draw different audiences.

      You may be confusing quality of the game with quality of the marketing budget.

    • Yeah, but I would expect those small games to not be sold at full price, more on the $20-$30 dollars range.

      And, if distributed electronically, they would cost a lost less.

      The only problem I see, is that the 512 mb of internal flash memory is too small for downloadable content. I expect them to smart up and include a harddisk if this is to be their new business model.

      • Re:Yes, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by superpulpsicle ( 533373 )
        There is this weird assumption that people will flock to game development!? Why? Look at Half-life expansion packs, there are only a small handful even after all these years as the premiere title for making your own addons. Everyone tries, few find success.

      • The only problem I see, is that the 512 mb of internal flash memory is too small for downloadable content.

        If it's 512 Mb (megabits), then by some estimations it'd be too small. On the other hand, 512 MB (megabytes) is quite a lot. Remember that all of The Sims for Game Boy Advance fits into 16 MB (Urbz is 32 MB), Feel the Magic for Nintendo DS is 32 MB, and a semi-polished Tetris clone for GBA [pineight.com] fits into 160 KB. And if you're willing to think back to NES-caliber games, none of the 8-bit Final Fantasy gam

      • True, 512 MB isn't huge compared to most hard disks, but for game saves it's certainly enough. Downloadable games and demos might be more of an issue, but the Revolution also supports SD flash cards, which are already becoming very affordable. Nintendo has confirmed that users will be able to transfer files from their Revolution to the SD cards and even to your PC, so space should never be an issue. I'd expect that a 1 GB SD card will be both affordable and spacious enough for most people. Who knows, Ninten

    • "Yes, but, if they finally do have access to this great money making market, and most of them still only sell 5,000 copies, perhaps that sheds some light on the quality of the games."

      The real problem with getting a new kind of game out there is finding money to make it and distribution channels that will give it exposure and sales. If Nintendo is really going to open their distribution channel to small game developers, (I'm skeptical because of the lack of details we've seen from Nintendo) then that is

  • Won't happen though (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    While its a cool idea, and the homebrew stuff on the dreamcast shows that people would be interested in it, it's just not going to happen. How many companies supported having random people producing games for their console? Will Nintendo be running quality control to make sure the console doesn't get bogged down with 50 versions of pong, all buggy? Will small developers get a break on the cost of licensing fees and devkits (where the console makers make a TON of money)?
    • id software started as shareware garage developers
    • Yep, Gotta sort through the crap. "Free" game licenses won't happen, but I can see some sort of dealing forming allowing developers in that hit certain benchmarks.

      More or less a free unregulated game market put up by them will be full of alot of crap, some with legal issues because it's such a clear ripoff. It will end up like the 10001 game machines you can buy at flea markets. 1000 versions of the same 10 games, all of them low quality ripoffs.

      What they might do is form a way to offer quality indie d

      • It would only be as bad as the unregulated movie industry, and there's no quality control there. There's plenty of crappy independent movies, sure...but there's also a lot of good stuff that wouldn't ever get made by the big guys.

    • Re:Won't happen though (Score:5, Interesting)

      by WhyCause ( 179039 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @11:00PM (#12743432)
      Think of it this way:

      Nintendo sets up an Indie Dev Program where an Indie Dev House presents a game concept to the company. The big N weeds out the pong clones, and leases/loans a dev kit to the worthy developer. The developer has to prove X amount of progress every so often (academic grants work this way), or they lose their dev kits.

      As part of the lease terms, Nintendo gets the publishing rights. Since Nintendo has not invested any 'real' money, any projects that are not up to snuff just get dropped, and Nintendo hasn't really lost anything (increased hardware sales/market penetration taking up the program cost). But, if they find a real winner (e.g., Alien Hominid) they can publish away, making a fair chunk of change. Even if they only get mediocre titles out of the deal, they could publish "Indie Packs" with ~4 games per disk. Sell them for ~$15, and you could have run-away success stories (would you pay $15 for the next Bejeweled and 3 other games? I would).

      Think about how cheaply this could be implemented. Nintendo could use a remote server to do all the compilation (i.e., IBM's on-demand stuff; think punch card submissions), making the dev kit nothing more than an emulator and document package (no progress, no access to the compilation servers, and no rogue hardware to worry about). To do your final testing, Nintendo burns a disk or two and ships them off to you. You verify that things look good, and submit 'final' code to Nintendo. If they decide to go ahead, they do their internal quality testing and then publish it. There are about four or five spots in that whole process where Nintendo can say, "Nope, forget it," and they cut their losses on that particular project.

      I'll bet that the media they'll be using will be cheap as hell to press, even in small runs, which is the linch-pin in making this whole thing feasibile. This set-up might even work for the DS, since it's apparent that small runs of the carts are reasonably cheap as well (I'm basing this on the fact that the Zelda trailer was handed out on DS carts at E3).
    • While its a cool idea, and the homebrew stuff on the dreamcast shows that people would be interested in it, it's just not going to happen. How many companies supported having random people producing games for their console?

      Here's all the proof I need to see that it *could* work: Little Fluffy Industries [littlefluffy.com], a listing of various and sundry cool web games. They tend to post roughly two or three a day (with the occaisional hiatus). Make a console-shaped valve to channel this creative output, and Nintendo jus
    • I don't think its anywhere near as impossible as it's been made to sound. All they need is some user based voting system. If everyone requires a Nintendo Rev. online account, it will be easy to track and limit votes. Combine that with a user rating, like Ebay or even Slashdot, and you can create a chart of the most popular, well programmed, and well designed games.

      If they charged 10 dollars to download a game, I would probably download a few of the top ones on that list. It would also be 'revolutionary

  • Interesting idea... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RootsLINUX ( 854452 ) <[rootslinux] [at] [gmail.com]> on Monday June 06, 2005 @08:52PM (#12742646) Homepage
    I really like Nintendo's approach here. Who cares about having all that computational power if neither Sony nor Microsoft (admitably) don't seem to care much for the games that would use it, instead opting for a more general entertainment purpose? Certainly this would be a very attractive choice for independent game developers to boost their sales and popularity of their titles, but what about game developers that want to distribute their games not-for-profit? I've been working on my own free (as in beer), open-source game for nearly a year now. I'd love the idea of seeing it played on a next-gen console one day, but I still wouldn't want to make people pay to play it. Would Nintendo still charge a "minimal fee" for games distributed on the Revolution? Or would they allow an exception for developers who wish to create and distribute games free-of-charge?
    • If Nintendo were to go licence free like the article suggests, then I'm sure they'd have no problem letting your free game be played as long as YOU supply the bandwidth to distribute it...
      • Here is one idea... what if they go the route of something like Google Video. Where they will offer to house all the content i.e. Game and you can charge if you want or give it away. Then if the game becomes very popular they will set a price and take a cut and pass the rest onto you the developer.

  • Great! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nb caffeine ( 448698 ) <nbcaffeineNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday June 06, 2005 @08:53PM (#12742653) Homepage Journal
    That would be my response. As a sometimes indie game developer (when i feel like it), one of my issues has been: I have this xbox, and i *could* compile my game for the xbox, but youd need it to be modded (and then theres actual legal issues about having the xdk) for it to work. If i can port my game to the revolution, ill fricken do it in a minute. I like the casual gaming atmosphere consoles have VS the secluded nature of PC gaming anyway. But as an indie developer, theres not a whole lot of say i have (if i want to keep it free, i gotta keep my costs down, this means, no dev kits)

    Anyone else think an inexpensive dev kit (maybe something that doesnt allow 100% access to all resources or something, so theres still a market for big third party developers) would be a great idea?
  • On a few older posts I have been saying that it would be great if a console maker released a SDK for everyone.

    If Nentendo does this I will waiting in line to buy a Revolution.

  • Quality Control (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 06, 2005 @09:22PM (#12742810)
    Nintendo would HAVE to have quality control in place, and hand-pick what games become available. Otherwise i would imagine someone somewhere would end up writing a trojan horse or other destructive program disguised as a game (imagine perhaps one that erases all your game saves?)

    That said, imagine the amount of staffing and time required to evaluate each and every crappy little home-brew submitted... !!!
    • Not if they developed an OS (Linux or BSD based maybe?) that didn't allow anything to be changed by the software that runs it. You don't have to worry about your CD player getting a virus do you? No...that's because the CDs' software is not allowed to alter your OS... The Xbox360 however might be a different story (sorry couldn't help myself! heh)

    • Or... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by game kid ( 805301 )
      ...they can just call them "Beta" and add to the manuals or online help: "Nintendo is not responsible for any damage caused to your system or television. Use of these immensely cool games will void your warranty and (in the case of some insane developers) give you an incurable epileptic seizure. Nintendo will not hear claims arising from the use of these Beta games, and mails requesting support for said games will be stamped with 'I told you so', 'Fuck off', or 'I have some good news--I just saved a bunch
      • They already have a warning about epileptic seizures on their startup screens ever since some mother tried to sue them because her son died since he kept playing those games despite getting seizures. I guess when Jackass Thompson sues them every Nintendo game will include a preface "The following performance is not real. Do not attempt to imitate. Doing so may cause injury or death".
    • Maybe nintendo could make developers register with them first after a screening process and release a disclaimer to download independant games at the users own risk.
    • The only thing that you can 'destroy', ie. delete, on a Revolution is the Flash Memory with all the Savegames on it and if Nintendo takes a little care it might be possible to simply lock that away from the running game and only allow to write to its own savegames and not play around with other games savegames. After all I can't destroy a Linux system either if I am only running a user process.

      On the other side there might of course always be bufferoverflows and other hacks that lets you escape the sandbox
    • too late they already released that viewitful joe 2 demo that erased all your saves.

  • For a commercial developer to sell 5000 copies of a game is woeful. Even if they had no expenses publishing and distributing the game, they aren't going to recoup the expense they put into making it.

    Alternatively, there could be a rash of hobbyist games, same as there is for PC. If you like, you can download free games from the Net right now, which are graphically unimpressive and just plain crap.

    How would that be good for the Nintendo Revolution?

    • Well, like you said....say there are no development costs? Say the team uses all free/open source software to develop their game with in their spare time... Then say there are only 6 guys who work on it... If their game sells for $30, and we'll say nintendo keeps a dollar out of that leaving them with just $29. That's $24,166.66 for each person if they were to split it evenly. That's a lot more than you would make in a year working at Walmart or McDonalds... Sure, it doesn't sound like much, and you'd proba

      • Thank you for your reply.

        But, there's no free/open source software for the Revolution at the time of writing, and it's probably going to remain closed-shop enough that open source will never compete with Nintendo itself.

        I just don't see it happening. Perhaps Nintendo will release a no-cost development kit, but within the limited lifecycle of the machine, I can't believe that any *decent* games will be homegrown. And so Nintendo will either not release the SDK, or not release the crappy games.

        Nintend

        • I know it's just a pipe dream, and that's why my current game production is only focused on PC for the moment... However what do you mean by "source forge class"? There's a wide range of quality there from really crappy to really good.

        • But, there's no free/open source software for the Revolution at the time of writing

          There is GameCube software, and thanks to back-compatibility, any GameCube software is Revolution software. There is also homebrew GameCube software loaded through the Ethernet port and Phantasy Star Online.

          Nintendo has a reputation. It wouldn't want to lose it over some source-forge class projects clogging up the Revolution user interface.

          Frozen Bubble. StepMania. Scorched3D. BZFlag. Source ports of classic Id Soft

  • From the article:

    Right - diddly/squat. 3000 games being trades, say every week, and Nintendo doesn't get a single red cent out of around $60,000 (or more!) being swapped about. [...]
    Now, that $60,000 a week can go right into Nintendo's pocket, a good application of the long tail right there.

    Sure, but how much of that will Nintendo have to pay for servers and their maintenance per week? These games have to be hosted, credit card (or equivalent) transactions have to be processed and there are many oth


    • My guess is that Nintendo wouldn't do it if it came at a loss, so they'll probably end up making some money, but not the 3 million the author talks about. Besides, three million is not a very insignificant figure if you look at their profits for one quarter.

      I think much more people would run old games on their consoles it they came as a really easy download.
      They could show some trailers or screenshots or make a "classice game of the week" with a playable demo.
      This way, many more than just a few geeks
  • While the author of the article makes a good point about the potential revenue in selling old games using a subscription service or "al la carte" , he fails to acknowledge that Nintendo has already implied that they are going to be offering 1st party games for free. http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/03/ 129259&tid=234&tid=10 [slashdot.org]

    Obviously Nintendo could always change their minds, but based on the language I'm seeing in that article, they are more interested in using the classic games as l

    • They are still undecided though releasing them for free is an option they're thinking about.

      http://www.planetgamecube.com/news.cfm?action=item &id=6320 [planetgamecube.com]
    • You bring up an interesting point about the classic games being free. If this is the case, wouldn't it be great for Nintendo to release the Revolution with every Mario platformer game preloaded?

      I miss the days of systems coming with a game. If Super Mario 1-3, Super Mario World, and Super Mario 64 were included with the system, that'd be a hell of an incentive for me to pick one up at launch.
      • I think the only reason that they wouldn't want to preload the games is because as the life of the console continues, games with legal or maybe even technical issues (emulation glitches?) that couldn't initially be released may become available for distribution later.

        This way people who buy the machine on launch date and people who buy the console two years down the road have the exact same ability to acquire the games.

        Also if you think about it, this gives people who don't have a wireless connection i

  • Outside of Gaming (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SillyHatsOnly ( 875532 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @10:01PM (#12743047)
    The older game crowd is probably already sold on buying on of these (which Nintendo profits off of unlike MS and Sony who subsidize). Many may have kids who will be able to experience the same games you grew up with (can we say family bonding?....DAAAAAD, I'm stuck on the second quest of zelda...*dad drops everything and runs to the rescue*).

    Sure, independent games may suck for the most part, but what about the prospects of educational software combined with low dev costs? How many schools would be able to customize software for (probably) a relatively small fee and a $200 system? There's a reason why the Sony dev kit is called a T-10k (think price here). Can't see public schools shelling out for one of those. And you can't buy a half decent computer for $200-ish.

    Give it a while and Mario may be teaching your kids to count, spell, type, and hack into gov computers. OOOOO kids LOOK! Numbers...gotta catch'em all...and beat other players at it online as well.

    • Give it a while and Mario may be teaching your kids to count, spell, type

      You obviously don't remember Mario Teaches Typing (typing tutor) or Mario Is Missing! (geography game).

  • The long tail is an artifact of selection bias. Online retailer biased journals like Wired work on the assumption that the collection of Amazon or iTMS is a complete library of everything people might want to buy. If that's not true, then the whole house comes crumbling down, and you basically are saying "everything Amazon bothers to sell moves at least one copy a month." Of course, Amazon is the master of pricing, and they will manipulate the price of anything growing stale quite well so that it does sell.
  • I think it's great the Nintendo is GOING TO DO, what the Phantom has been promising to do for what, like, three years now...bring internet downloadable console games to the masses. So now that Nintendo is FINALLY going online, I'm sure Sony and MS wish they wouldn't, because can they compete with a library of 100's of classic games that we all grew up with?
    • Nintendo never promised to allow downloads for Revolution nor Gamecube games....just N64 and older... The meager 512MB storage space should be a good sign of that. :/

    • XBox already does it with XBox Live arcade. Of course it doesn't have a back catalog of sutff like Nintendo, but so far they have copies of a bunch of classic games and some new one, with new games being added.

  • Developing for the Revolution? I think not... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by non0score ( 890022 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @10:45PM (#12743325)
    Now, don't take the title as I'm against indie developers. As a matter of fact, I'm all for it.

    But to not tarnish Nintendo's new flagship product by a bunch of poorly polished indie games, I don't think Nintendo will allow any random person to develop for the newest system itself. However, remember that the Nintendo Revolution is backwards compatible? Remember that Nintendo said it's also designed for the indie developers low on budget but big on ideas? Well, if you're an indie developer low on budget, you wouldn't need the power of the core Revolution (by core, I mean the most computationally powerful part of the Revolution). You'd only need, say, the N64 part. Or maybe even the GameCube part. That should more than suffice for indie developers trying to prove a concept (think Alien Hominin while still in the Flash stage). This way, Nintendo could offer NES/SNES/N64/GameCube dev kits for free (or some reasonably low cost), yet keep the core Revolution dev kits at industry prices. In addition, Nintendo could easily "promote" promising developers while still disassociating itself from poorly written games.

    Furthermore, Nintendo could allow indie developers to host their own games and forcing them to offer the games for free. That way, Nintendo can't be blamed for allowing the sales for bad games, since whether or not these games are poorly written, they weren't "sold" in the first place. And if a game ends up being successful, Nintendo could buy/negotiate for the idea and (help) produce it for the core Revolution.
    • I think that you are starting to hit the nail on the head. I think that Iwata's comments about the Revolution allowing games with the "best ideas, not the biggest buget" to succeed is a very important point to highlight. Nintendo has restated this point numerous times in regards to the system. In a way, this is most obviously speaking to developers. But I think it goes further.

      During his keynote at the game developers conference and again at E3, Iwata made it a point to mention that his favorite part

  • Phantom? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @12:13AM (#12743889) Homepage
    This is actually starting to sound a lot like the Phantom console, except well thought-out. Fully polished and professional releases would be full price, available in stores. Smaller teams, who would still have to submit to some form of format QA, would be able to sell smaller titles cheaply the same way that cell phone game companies do. Gamers could go to the store and buy the new Zelda for 50 dollars, or on impulse in the living room could buy the original Zelda for 5. Or they could run out and buy Alien Hominid for 40 dollars, or download a Revolution version of the webgame at the cost of watching some ads. Maybe all of Nintendo's old games are available at the cost of watching a few ads while you play... between levels or at various other times. Perhaps any indie development firm will be able to setup such an arrangement, with Nintendo's traditional profit/risk sharing model.

    If any of the above speculation is true, it sounds like Nintendo has finally embraced the network in a major way... perhaps even more so than Microsoft has, and certainly differently.

    This generation of consoles is going to be interesting indeed. Controllers are wireless, consoles are wired.

    • I hope Nintendo isn't listening, because I sure as hell don't share your opinion that ad-filled games would be a Good Thing. I'd rather pay five or so bucks to run classic games than being invaded by ads while I play on a game console.
      • I'd rather pay 5 or six bucks to play certain great games ad-free. Metroid springs to mind, as does Secret of Mana and Axelay. Unfortunately, Nintendo has consistently priced their classics far higher than this threshold... with old NES games on the GBA going for 20 dollars or so. 5 dollars is probably a pipe dream.

        However, would you buy Milon's Secret Castle if it was 5 - 20 dollars? How about if it didn't cost you anything, just some annoying ads? Would you try Solomon's Key, 3D World Runner, Dariou
        • "with old NES games on the GBA going for 20 dollars or so. 5 dollars is probably a pipe dream."

          Yeah, but keep in mind they have to cover up hardware costs. Last time I checked, the traditional cartridge format is annoyingly expensive to manufacture, which is the main reason why it was abandonned in everything but Nintendo's handhelds. It's what made N64 games horribly expensive compared to Playstations discs, which cost next to nothing to produce. And those were just 64MB!!

          Now, with fully digital delivery
  • I would LOVE to just lounge back on the couch and burn through some time playing cool indy games - it just makes it more fun than playing them at my desk on one of my computers.

  • Before imagining all kinds of things into Nintendo's next console, let's think about the economics of this for a second:

    • Nintendo has to provide the infrastructure for a downloading service
    • Nintendo has to somehow make sure no harmful software can be downloaded

    That means that Nintendo will have to control/license everything available for download. They're probably not going to give the development kits away for free simply to make sure they won't have to review crap from wannabe-programmers who want to m

    • Yeah, I've got problems with the idea. The back catalog is cool, and will tap into the nostalgia market, but if you're going to do a revolution, you can't go halfway.
      The NES inaugurated the current console business model, where the software paid for the hardware. By taking their cut from the software sales, the console makers could also insist on uniform QA and comprehensible interfaces, and prevent the retail channels from being flooded with ET clones. What the NES did to console games was like what McDona
    • Well, if they're distributing the dev kits, why not just treat every game like its own folder? If a game is digitally signed, it'll have access to other game folders. Each game's signature would only allow it read/write access to its own folder or memory card items.

      In this case, harmful software could only hurt itself. Am I oversimplifying or missing something?
      • Nintendo has to provide the infrastructure for a downloading service
      • Nintendo has to somehow make sure no harmful software can be downloaded

      There is already a working model for this kind of setup in the Symbian Signed [symbiansigned.com]* application quality assesment process.

      The developer downloads the dev kits (for free, I might add) from the main web site, and programs her little heart out. If said dev is certain of an application's success, she can pay a fee to have the application tested and certified. The

  • Some of the speculation around Nintendo's method of selling and distributing the older games reminds me a lot of Apple's iPod. Awhile back, I read an article where Steve Jobs talked about how they really didn't make much money selling $.99 songs, but made a killing on all of the iPods they were selling.

    Because the Revolution is supposedly a lot less powerful than either the Xbox 360 or the PS3, it will cost a lot less to make. Nintendo can and will sell them at a lower price than the competition and sti

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