4 ms·
Quality is subjective. The value Nintendo was preserving with their cartridge licensing was the retail price. Too many low-cost games taking up shelf space in r
by whoopdedo 5y ago
Quality is subjective. The value Nintendo was preserving with their cartridge licensing was the retail price. Too many low-cost games taking up shelf space in retail stores makes it harder to sell premium games. Games were sold for Nintendo consoles at remarkable prices, which encouraged studios to invest in high quality games. Chrono Trigger in 1995 was released for 11400yen (US$124.50 at the time).
But an app store doesn't have the limitation of inventory. No number of low-cost games will impair the ability to sell the premium titles. Not needing to worry about dilution, the store operator reverts to rent-seeking behavior and will approve the most number of games as they can. Or will create artificial scarcity by restricting access to popular titles.
When buying physical media, licensing balances the needs of the publisher, producer, and customer. But in the digital world there's almost no overlap.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sitkack 5y agoSo how do we preserve an ecosystem and prevent what I think you are outlining is a bimodal distribution between a vast majority of cheap low cost games and a few high production value games, is that correct?
- brianwawok 5y agoIf you believe in the free market, the entire game ecosystem is free games with pay to unlock features. Or you believe in a curated market and let the curator of each market set rules.
- dwighttk 5y ago>No number of low-cost games will impair the ability to sell the premium titles I think they do in a different way. An expensive phone game is $5. Every once in a while a game will try to break that mold and they get mocked.
- Jensson 5y agoThat is interesting, there is nothing stopping high budget games from being on phones, its just cultural. Genshin impact can be played on phones, but it is one of very few examples.
- delecti 5y agoThat can't really be a relevant example of an impaired high-price game though, because it's free everywhere.
- Jensson 5y agoYou can't have a game be free on one platform and cost money on another either, at least I am not aware of any such games. So either it is free/cheap everywhere or you don't release it on phones. Edit: And by high budget games I mean games with a high development budget, not games that costs a lot to buy. Genshin impact is a AAA game that runs on phones, they invested $100 million to make it, that is what I meant by it being a high budget game.
- Pathogen-David 5y ago> You can't have a game be free on one platform and cost money on another either, at least I am not aware of any such games. It's not totally unheard of. Among Us is paid on PC/console but free on mobile. PUBG was similar before it went free to play on all platforms earlier this year.
- lupire 5y agoAmong Us is $5 on PC/Switch and ad-supported freemium on Android. Not a AAA game as discusssed on this thread.
- delecti 5y agoMy point is that the discussion wasn't around "high budget", it was around "high price". Yes Genshin Impact is high budget, but it's free everywhere so it's not relevant to the phenomenon of there effectively being a cap on game prices on phones.
- kevinmchugh 5y agoIf Nintendo invested more in curation, visibility, and filtering tools the shovelware wouldn't be such a problem for me. I only have so much time I'm willing to look at titles and if I see 90% crap I'm less likely to make purchases. Netflix also has unlimited inventory space and they spend tons of engineering effort in optimizing the content they show people when they launch the app.
- fomine3 5y agoTo be fair, Apple and Google's store are also crap to navigate. I wonder what is the difficulty.