RE: We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.
04-26-2014, 01:00 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-26-2014, 01:14 AM by Jacquerel.)
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit but I've always seen Nintendo's strategy as maintaining their stable of cookie cutter titles that reliably sell so that they can then use the profit to fund any riskier stuff. Like... the Wii, which turned out to fund itself anyway, and the Wii U, which didn't.
Widely panned as they may be for being derivative... if you look at the sales info for sales of mario titles vs distance from basic platformer formula they're basically in an inverse ratio. Luigi's Mansion, Sunshine, Paper Mario and even Mario 64 were risks and while most people here would probably regard them as the more interesting titles they were still not actually as popular as the games that scroll from left to right and chiefly have you jump between platforms.
Keeping the Pokemon games that don't use standard mechanics as spinoffs protects The Brand, as it were.
A small game developer's basic goal is usually "I need to make enough money with this game to fund the next game", which is a terribly scary thing. What you ideally want to do is make enough money to fund the next three games so you aren't constantly living by the skin of your teeth, because gaming is a terribly fickle world and it takes a year plus for what you are making to actually come to fruition so you can't necessarily trust what the climate looked like when you started.
When you're a big company, with a lot of employees and many buns in the oven at once, this doesn't actually get a lot easier because people just expect you to spend more money per game by increasing production values. You're juggling earning back what you're paying people while building up enough to fund the next title to an even greater extent.
Gotta make money to spend money to make money to have enough spare to take risks without being in any actual danger.
If you try and make something weird every time then yeah you might get a bit less flak on internet forums but you're also far more likely to strike out with a title and suddenly realise that you have very little by way of a safety net.
Capitalism.
Unforgivable that they haven't made Pokemon Snap 2 yet though.
Widely panned as they may be for being derivative... if you look at the sales info for sales of mario titles vs distance from basic platformer formula they're basically in an inverse ratio. Luigi's Mansion, Sunshine, Paper Mario and even Mario 64 were risks and while most people here would probably regard them as the more interesting titles they were still not actually as popular as the games that scroll from left to right and chiefly have you jump between platforms.
Keeping the Pokemon games that don't use standard mechanics as spinoffs protects The Brand, as it were.
A small game developer's basic goal is usually "I need to make enough money with this game to fund the next game", which is a terribly scary thing. What you ideally want to do is make enough money to fund the next three games so you aren't constantly living by the skin of your teeth, because gaming is a terribly fickle world and it takes a year plus for what you are making to actually come to fruition so you can't necessarily trust what the climate looked like when you started.
When you're a big company, with a lot of employees and many buns in the oven at once, this doesn't actually get a lot easier because people just expect you to spend more money per game by increasing production values. You're juggling earning back what you're paying people while building up enough to fund the next title to an even greater extent.
Gotta make money to spend money to make money to have enough spare to take risks without being in any actual danger.
If you try and make something weird every time then yeah you might get a bit less flak on internet forums but you're also far more likely to strike out with a title and suddenly realise that you have very little by way of a safety net.
Capitalism.
Unforgivable that they haven't made Pokemon Snap 2 yet though.