BTRA said:
Just needs to be repeated with all the crazy lunatics in here without a business degree or know how.
If you've got a business degree or know how, or for any other reason are able to explain why anyone's counterarguments don't hold up logically, then maybe you should do so. That sounds to me like a slightly more constructive route than blanket mockery aimed toward nobody-even-knows-who.
Here are some of the counterarguments, as a refresher:
Nintendo wants to maximize sales of previously-released games before they put out more games that could potentially cannibalize sales of others.
Due to the way Wii Points are distributed, a majority of VC purchases will leave extra points remaining on a buyer's system. Buying any one game purchase implicitly involves some promotion toward the idea of buying other games, for the same reason that coupons give incentives for future purchases; people frequently want to spend as much as is available to them, given that what's available to them isn't redeemable in any other way.
Also, Iwata claimed recently--I believe it was in one of those reports at the end of the fiscal year?--that sales for Virtual Console games go up in a slower and more long-term manner than retail releases, which sell a great deal initially and then taper off. If that's the case, it stands to reason that it doesn't hurt to put up more than one or two games per week, since the importance of sales at the exact release date is reduced.
With the VC/WiiWare, if everything was put up on day one, people would head straight for the Super Mario Bros 3s, the Earthbounds, the Kirby Super Star, etc. and the smaller games would get no recognition at all.
I mean, I don't think people would take a second look at River City Ransom or Pokemon Puzzle League if a huge VC library was initially released.
By the time River City Ransom and Pokemon Puzzle League were made available, a huge VC library had shored up over time--a library that includes Super Mario Bros. 3 along with many games that were far more commercially-successful than Earthbound and Kirby Super Star, such as the rest of the 2D Mario platformers, the Sonic series, the Legend of Zelda series, the Donkey Kong Country series, and Mario Kart 64. Whether all of these games had been released in November 2006 or arrived over a period of more than a year makes no difference to RCR and PPL in the here and now; they would be competing with that full back catalog either way.
Let's note that there are hundreds of thousands of new Wii owners each month in the US alone--more than 700,000 new ones in April, as we just saw. Any new release is being "cannibalized" at least to a certain extent, because those who didn't get a chance to buy a Wii for a long while inevitably end up looking at the back catalog in its entirety the first time they take a glance into the Shop Channel.
But I would see it as irrational if someone used this fact as a basis to mount up a theory that Nintendo should have released games slower than they did throughout 2006 and 2007. River City Ransom might have sold to more people if Nintendo only put out one game each week for 2007, but nobody is saying in hindsight that they wish that had been Nintendo's path or that three-game weeks were just too sizable a flood of gaming goodness. (On the contrary: in 2007 people complained about Wii's software drought almost on a monthly basis, from Twilight Princess to Super Paper Mario, and then from Super Paper Mario to Metroid Prime 3.)
And yet here in 2008, for some reason, people are putting forward roughly tantamount arguments by defending an exceptionally-slowed-down release schedule. You can't have it both ways. Either three games per week were too many because they were cannibalizing each other throughout 2007 and those two months of 2006, or one game per week is too few because simultaneous releases aren't hurting one another as much as some people seem to believe.
[I'll say this. With systems such as SNES, Genesis, PS1, GBA, PS2, and DS, the only context in which I ever saw anyone complain about too many games being released was when too many games were being released simultaneously--generally in November or December--and the person in question couldn't afford them all. But that issue is much less relevant and less likely with Virtual Console for two reasons. First, VC games are nowhere near as cost-prohibitive as retail releases; anyone who couldn't handle six or seven VC games worth downloading in a single month wouldn't likely have been the type to spend $250 on a system in the first place. Second, a major reason that it's such a problem to see numerous retail releases close to each other is that it's expedient--if not pivotal--to buy a retail game in relatively short order due to a limited shelf life. VC has no such problem. Any game a person could take interest in but be unable to afford for a while--if $5-10 is somehow just too overwhelming--could be bought at any later date.]
Oh, and small third parties get their brief time in the limelight... yadda-yadda-yadda.
There aren't many small third-parties who have made games available on Virtual Console. Out of the 244 games available between Europe and North America, 159 of them were from either Capcom, D4, Factor 5, Hudson, Konami, Namco, Sega, Square-Enix (including Taito), or Tecmo (third-parties, but not small ones), and 61 more were from Nintendo (including HAL). I don't know the sizes of some of the other publishers, like Aksys, Irem, G-mode, or Commodore Gaming, but even if I go ahead and assume they're all small, a defense predicated on helping 24 games out of 244 seems like a stretch to me.
