HI Charles, I think the game industry has good reasons for keeping the prices high, and marketing the game consoles the way they do. If you remember back in the late 1970's and early 1980's Atari didn't have any restrictions on who could create games for their platform. Not surprisingly there was a huge explosion of game developers racing to produce games for the console. Many of the big name companies of today like Activision, Nintendo, etc got their start on the Atari 2600 and expanded from there. While this might sound like a good thing it was not. Atari wasn't making any money on royalties for the platform and were competing against dozens of other companies on their own platform without a lot of money coming in from sales. I don't know all the details, but I do know Atari went bankrupt and they said it was because the competition whiped them out.
For example, in 1985 one of the new comers to the seen decided to release their own platform and called it the Nintendo Entertainment System. One thing that made the NES instantly more popular was a better processor, more ram, better resolution, better color graphics, etc and all of that added up to superior games. Atari who was on their 7800 series was in deep financial trouble and couldn't keep up with Nintendo. What did Nintendo do differently that Atari didn't? Simple when they put out there console they started the practice of exclusive licenses and royalties etc. If you wanted to compete with Nintendo on their platform you had to pay Nintendo big fees to port your game to their console. Obviously, it worked because Nintendo is still going strong with a long history of consoles over a 25 year period of time. Atari is ancient history. The other reason is standardization. Atari didn't have any restrictions who could develope games for their platform and I can say there were some really low -quality games for the platform. That kind of low standard compared to Nintendo's strict standards helped bury Atari. No one wanted to take the risk of buying a dud when they know Nintendo's games all have high ratings and not just any Jo Smith from nowhere can create is own game for it. Cheers! On 2/15/11, Charles Rivard <[email protected]> wrote: > Am I missing something, and maybe not looking at it right or not > understanding something, but don't these companies realize that if they made > these programs available to more developers, and at a lower cost, the number > of games available for their systems would vastly increase?, and so would > their income? I'm not talking specifically about making games playable by > the blind, either. If I wanted to develop games for, well, whoever, that > could be played on a game console, if there were fewer restrictions and less > of a cost to me, and how many other potential game developers, the money > would be coming in even faster to the console designers and sellers. > > --- > Shepherds are the best beasts! --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
