Virtual console game prices need to be halved!

[famousringo]

Armads said:

famousringo said:

You're not really refuting my point. As you point out, VC is already a larger market than WiiWare at prices which you consider to be outrageous. If Nintendo slashed prices on VC games in half, bringing non-participants like yourself into the VC market and stimulating more purchases from active VC buyers, it's only going to swell the size of the VC market and draw people away from WiiWare games.

It would be great for the consumer, and might even be good for Nintendo's direct revenues, but it would be lousy for small developers. Nintendo cares about those small developers.

If you read the full article you'll see that VC has been on a steady decline in sales while WW has been on a steady rise.  It's predicted to overtake it in a year.  Yet for both VC and WW the sales are mostly driven by hit titles, most of the games on either service do not generate very much profit at all whereas the good games, the ones we should be encouraging to be made make almost all of the money.  Lowering the price on VC games will take away primarily from already poor performing software because if the software is good the people will buy it. 

As the posts in this thread demonstrate, the reason why WiiWare has been gaining on VC is because Nintendo has been deliberately starving the VC of new releases so that they don't distract too much from WiiWare. Right now the VC is simply used as a buffer to make sure that new games are ready for the shop in case WiiWare titles aren't ready to go yet. Your proposal threatens this deliberate cultivation of the indie developer market.

And I'm not sure that indie developers would be encouraged by your attitude that the hits will be fine and to hell with the rest of the games. How is an indie developer to know whether the idea in his head is hit material or not? That's not the kind of thing you know until you've already taken the risk and sunk many months into development. Telling indies that they shouldn't bother unless they have a hit is more likely to discourage those hit games than it is to encourage them.