16th September 2005, 7:10 PM
(This post was last modified: 16th September 2005, 7:36 PM by Smoke.)
GamesIndustry.biz interviews NOE's Marko Hein.
Quote:So the problem is, we are facing increasing development budgets, but the price for the end product is not increasing. It's actually declining when you look at it carefully. There are some factors with retail etc, but I think the consumer is unwilling to pay more for a more sophisticated product, which I can understand; what consumer would pay EURO 100 for a video game?
The question is, how do we overcome this problem? The money has to come from somewhere. So the only chance we have is to grow the market; to find more consumers and get them into videogames. What we see in Japan is that the market is stagnant; it doesn't grow very easily. Japan's market is even declining now. Europe is the only market which is quite healthy right now. So what we as Nintendo believe is that we need to look for different user groups to get into videogames.
Quote:What do you make of Phil Harrison's comment ahead of the PSP launch in Europe, saying that the competition between DS and PSP is irrelevant? It's funny because I heard that he was praising Nintendogs [in his GDCE keynote], saying that it was a fantastic product and that a lot of people at Sony were playing it. I have to give credit to Sony because what they've done with EyeToy and with SingStar has also opened up a different experience and new set of consumers. So I think we are going in the right direction; even Sony.
Microsoft I'm not so sure about right now, because they are traditionally very focused on the hardcore gamers. With Sony I can see tendencies that they take this innovative approach very seriously. I think we are just going further in providing completely new gaming experiences which we did with DS and we should definitely do with Revolution.