where have you been?? Its always been like that on WiiWare, hell i remember when they were charging for a web browser, they dont anymore fortunately

Thats funny, cause i sure as hell dont see any content on WiiWare, at least none thats worth a damn. The last good thing was MDK2, IMHO

LOL. ZING from the present.

Let's see what new strange comparison squirrel can make to get himself out of this one! Take it away squirrel!

Edit.

First off, Steam started out as a very abusive/hated service and it was only after about 5 years that people actually started to see it as a positive ...

With that said, I think you are working really hard not to see my point. Regardless of which approach you prefer, or which approach actually works out better, there are (generally) two incompatible approaches a service can take when it comes to the pricing of digital distributed content; you can set and protect a price level which tends to focus on high margin low sales, or you can allow companies to price however they want which tends to devolve into a low margin high sales model.

Much like Apple did with the iTunes music store (which was highly successful) Nintendo has choosen to set and protect a price level for their content. Regardless of whether they have achieved this, the approach is taken to ensure that a game can sell for a high enough value that the company turns a profit; hopefully resulting in increased content creation in the future.

In contrast, the approach of allowing prices to be set by anyone is usually taken to create high enough demand to compensate for low per-unit sales.

Now, Nintendo's "Failure" and Steams "Success" has almost nothing to do with pricing strategy ...

While Valve agressively worked to drive both consumers and publishers to their platform, Nintendo has neglected these services because they did not see a greater value in them. Realistically, if you switched their approaches to how games were priced Wiiware would still struggle to find content or consumers and Steam would still be the highly popular service it is.

Present Zing: How is completely ignoring the privacy and security of your users, letting their information be stolen, and then creating terms and services that prevent users from suing you for your incompetence "pro-consumer"?

Oh I agree Nintendo aproach has it merits- for company.

But i can't understand how can anyone defend the "entertainment always for full price" stance as benefitting consumers when it clearly doesn't work in real world (but theory behind it sounds cool).

iTunes are wholly different since they charge 1$ per song and as such offer much better deal than classic cds.

These guys have no right to complain, they released four games in the service and all of them sold more than 10,000 units for a price ranging from 5 to 8 dollars/euros; it was only their high spectations on an Arkanoid clone that sold poorly (and didn't get any revenue) that nearly tanked their company.

It is that same game that is inflaiting their sales number in the other platforms by giving it away for free. You can't compare oranges and apples and then complain. If they are bitter and prefer apples fine, just don't rub your left over orange juices all over the place. Get over it.

"I think so far we've made about $500 on iOS."

Interesting. That's reality vs iOS hyperbole based on Rovio success.

As for Nintendo, it's a bit off saying 'they obviously don't want to reveal bad sales' when it's their quarterly charts that cause the biggest adjustments on this site, and they aren't normally in Nintendo's favour. They don't have to release those either, but they do.

A guy I graduated from Universiy with joined a local small "casual" game developer immediately after graduation. When he started there, the company was making games similar to games you see on mobile phones/tablets today for the PC and selling them on their website (and through other services) for about $20 a peice, and they were turning a small profit.  I hadn't seen him in a couple years and we got together for beers last night after work and he had a few interesting things to say.

Back in 2009 (or so) they moved from PC based casual game development to ios (and recently adopted Android) because of the massive interest from investors for companies producing games for mobile phones. Since then their company has trippled in size, their average game is being played by far more people, and they're making about half as much revenue as they once did.

From what I have been told by several sources, and what I have seen myself, development for the mobile platforms is similar to the dot com bubble. While there will eventally be a viable business model that emerges from this, the vast majority of development is being driven by speculative investment into companies that are bleeding money; driven by an irrational belief that these companies will (eventually) be able to produce a game that has been bought millions of times at $1 to $5, when most of them struggle to get anywhere near that level giving their game away for free.