Gnizmo said:
The example is fine. Nintendo owns the rights to Goldeneye (or at least enough for veto power of the game) and Halo 2 is an old game with a sequel already out. But I will approach this from a different stand point since you don't seem to follow the analogy. How does it benefit Nintendo to release the game on the competitions system? It does not at all. Now there is an offer for the old version of the game, but Nintendo clearly stands to gain more by getting the remake that is already done. The competition getting the remake gives the competitor a selling point, and more money for every game sold. Neither of those are good. Further, the remakes existence will hurt the appeal of the old version appearing on the Virtual Console. Accepting anything less than an equivalent product is the same as making a good game for the system and gimping your own port. Nintendo owns the rights, and thus has the right to demand an equivalent version. |
Enough with Halo, it has no place in this discussion. Halo is a series that is very much alive (even the old Halo 2 had almost 13000 players on live the last 24 hours) with many sequels and new projects coming around. Goldeneye is a long dead title with no future prospects.
Yes, the competitors enhanced version might sell better (there are more to sales than software quality ie marketing, traffic on live arcade vs virtual console etc) however, they had to pay the cost for development, so their profit margin is not necessarily higher even if their version of the game sells more. In this sense, it is better for Nintendo to just take what they can get. Right now, as it stands, they are making nothing on the game. If the deal goes through as is, they would at least make some money on it. Maybe their version wouldn't sell as much as MS's version, but they don't have development costs to recover, unlike MS.
