September 14th

[A Black Falcon]

It's the scope of the games. Nintendo said that they wanted to scale back and make games fun again, less complicated, so more people could play. There's also the fact that Nintendo was alarmed at the rising budget of video games and wanted to change that...that should lend itself to cheaper games, especially compared to the epic type games being released on 360/PS3. I'm not saying all games should be cheaper, but the simpler ones should. Something like Metroid Prime or Zelda justify a $50 or $60 price tag, but to know something simple like the new Warioware will be anything more than $30 is not cool.

Nintendo said that with the DS too, and the Gamecube. Look what it got us -- some titles that are indeed aimed at the mass market, and other ones for the hardcore Nintendo fans. It'll be exactly the same with the Wii. There will be at least as many deep, complex games as there are on the DS, and probably more because this is a major console and that means higher budgets. Just look at Zelda... all reports I have seen agree that if anything the Wii controller just makes the game more complex... Nintendo talks about simplicity, but then introduces new control schemes that actually allow for greater depth. It happened with the DS, and it'll happen here too.

If you're thinking of graphics first, though, the whole argument is kind of irrelevant because you're probably never going to listen to Nintendo's philosophy this generation...

As for prices, you'd have to be completely insane to expect $39.99 Wii games. DS games are $19.99 to $34.99, with about $30 as the average. Gamecube games are about $50. Nintendo is well known for really, really disliking to drop the prices of its games -- witness how many GBA games from like 2002 are still $29.99... while it is reasonable to expect Nintendo to not raise its game prices with the Wii, given their statements over the past year, expecting a drop is absurd. Ignoring all the times that they talked about $50 games, just think it over... Wii games may have lower development costs than PS3 or X360 games, but they cost more than GC ones for sure, given how it's about twice as powerful, and with GC games at $50...

That has to be one of the craziest statements I've ever heard. It's not like the Wii is a previous-gen console with games being sold at budget prices. And development may be easier for developers in terms of the architecture, but they still have to develop unique ways to control their games. It's not like they can churn out a Wii game in a month compared to 6 months - 1 year for a PS3/360 game. I have an HDTV, but I'm not paying $60 for games on 360 just because they look nicer. If the game is available for another system for $50 I don't think the better graphics are worth the extra $10.

Exactly. Development time for major Wii releases will be just as long as it will be for PS3 and X360 games, or close enough that the difference won't matter much... some may be significantly less (Brain Training or something), but those will probably not start at $50, so it balances out. There's a lot more to game development than just graphics...

Oh yes, and the $60 thing is a third party idea, on the X360 at least; Microsoft's first party games are $50... they just have a lot fewer of them than Nintendo has on its systems. (remember how some early GBA games were $40? While first party games were $30? Yeah.)

Oh yeah, and WarioWare GC was $30. While the Wii version well might be more expensive due to it actually being a new game and not just an upgrade of the GBA title, though...