| Darwinianevolution said: I don't think Nintendo would make more money from that kind of deal that if they keep their online free. 1. Some of the best Nintendo games are based on multiplayer. If you install a paywall, most of those sales will go away. 2. Nintendo would need to give their users free games to make the deal worth the price. Since the 3rd party support and indies are just not the same on Nintendo consoles (at least on the home consoles), Nintendo would have to make deals with other developers. And with the small userbase of the home consoles, those would be expensive deals. Even most of the virtual console offerings aren't enough, specially when there's just so many ways to get those games through emulation, even more so than PS or XBox games. 3. A good chunk of hardware sales are from parents that want to buy their kids their first console. If you put a paywall, they will undoubtedly go to tablets and mobiles, and Nintendo is having problems mantaining that demographic already. 4. One of the main selling points of Nintendo consoles is their free online. Even if it's inferior to the competition, it's still free. 5. 3rd parties already don't want to do anything with Nintendo, so a online paywall would just give them another excuse to switch to other devices. |
1. MS was alone with their paywall on 360. Their main exclusives are Halo and Gears, both multiplayer oriented. The biggest 3rd party game was CoD, basically online only. The sales never went away.
2. Small userbases = less download = cheaper deals. Devs confirmed that Sony basically offers the equivalent of the income they would get selling the game instead of giving it for free. So if you have less sales, you need to pay less.
3. That can be a fair point. But looking at 360, it is heavily biased towards high holiday sales, a pattern more oriented to gifts for kids. Just play a bit of CoD and we will see a lot of 12 year olds there. The subscription is cheaper than a single game, once per year. If you advertise it with the free games, it's even better for parents. You don't have to buy a lot of games for a console that gets 2 free ones per month.
4. Wii U is lagging behind massively compared to X1 and PS4. The free online isn't helping it to sell. The low sales of CoD just show that nobody jumped ship to play online for free. Again, 360 was the king of online last gen, even if it charged for it.
5. Why? It isn't an issue for MS and Sony. 3rd parties are more concerned about the weaker specs that, in the future, will demand basically a port from the scratch to work on Wii U and low software sales.
I think people overreact about the paywall. It's 50 bucks a year. It's cheaper than a single new game. And you get cloud saving and free games each month. It's not like it's an absurd value, with the free games it's actually a sweet deal.
360 is the main proof that people don't care. If 360 was a massive flop and PS3 was the dominant force, we wouldn't see paywalls anymore. But people didn't care. Sony put a paywall on PS4 and instead of seeing it do worse than PS3, PS4 is simply crushing its predecessor numbers.
