Improving The Console Downloadable Game Biz
Over at his Klei Entertainment blog, Eets creator Jamie Cheng has an excellent post called 'Improving the Console Downloadable Games Business', which gets into an area that's particularly important for independent developers in today's market.
This is a particularly interesting listed factor - 'More focus on instant play value': "Even though I understand Microsoft and Sony’s strategy of promoting their download offerings as a source of creative and “new” types of games, I somehow feel they’re doing at the expense of certain potential. New styles of play on an old interface (the controller) often necessitates a learning curve, and this learning curve creates a barrier for customers. Instead, I think they should be focusing on games that are instantly fun — exactly as Microsoft’s name calls for — consumers want arcade games!"
A possibly controversial one, too, is 'Less focus on retro games and advergaming': "Let’s be honest — when you download a game that’s twenty years old, you had great memories of it and are expecting to be thrust back into the nostalgia. Instead, the game is incredibly difficult, and man do the graphics suck. When your new downloads page is filled with these offerings, or poor quality advergames, you’re going to be skeptical about coming back to try new games; you may even miss that great original indie title you’ve been waiting for. In a nutshell — the poor quality games are drowning out and hurting the very games that the platforms are trying to push." Read the full post for more context (and some Virtual Console praise), but I'm not sure I agree - anyone?
Comments
Oh, I'm very sure I disagree. Not only is the PAL version of the Wii VC sub-par, but describing the vast majority of older -heck, classic- games "poor quality" is almost offensive. Well, not really, but still...
Posted by: gnome | October 31, 2007 11:35 AM
I definitely agree, 99% of those retro games suck. One exception _was_ Ms. Pac Man, but now PacMan:CE
has sort of ruined that.
It would be great if the XBLA versions were all :CE rather than just the same game with new (or in some cases "2xSaI" scaled) graphics. Improving the graphical resolution doesn't really help the awkward controls, clunky collision detection, boring gameplay, etc..
The main problem is that two decades of refinements and improvements have been made to a lot of the genres these games helped create. Who wants to play the original Double Dragon? I played that game a lot back in the day, but now it's awkward and slow as hell.. there are 3 attacks and it's just not really anywhere near as much fun as, say, the GBA version of River City Ransom.
Sometimes subsequent games supercede "classics" and make them irrelevant. I remember when "Cool Boarders" were great PS1 snowboarding games.. and then I played Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and realized how awkward and stupid the controls in CB were. Some games (Mortal Kombat) sucked already when they first came out.. no need to revisit them!
I don't know if it counts as "retro", but DOOM was a great pick for XBLA since many fans (myself included) very rarely had access to a good 4-player lan game.
VC at least has some proper classics which bear replaying, like the Zeldas and Marios. The difference between these and the XBLA retro titles is a lot like the difference between watching a 40s movie vs watching a 20s movie -- the 20s movie is much more likely to be un-enjoyable/frustrating/boring simply because so many useful conventions hadn't been invented or established.
Posted by: raigan | October 31, 2007 2:34 PM