The "General Games Chat" forum, which includes Retro Game Reviews, has been archived and is now read-only. You cannot post here or create a new thread or review on this forum.
If these reported rumours are true, people may find Sony to be their best friend again, currently the only company who have been able to meet the demand for Dev Kits, and they have the largest number of developers supporting their console. What may also be worrying developers about the situation with the Dev Kits is that they are being pushed down the same road as Microsoft, by giving developer support through publishig companies and not direct with the team responsible for developing the console. This may lead to games being released way below par and being totally outshone by Nintendo and Rare, or anyone ese being regarded as a good frien to the GC i.e. Sega!!
This situation happened with the N64, Nintendo didn't support the developers directly, and when problems surfaced, they just jumped ship and were mopped up by the willing Sony, providing their own developer support scheme!!
It will be a sad sight to see for Nintendo, but they may look forward on the horizon and see Sony crossing the finishing line whilst they are struggling to keep the engine running!!
> £180 for 3 games is obscene!
indeed! $60 a game is a huge sum of money... think about it. Say you get paid £5 an hour (which is a HUGE amount at my age!), you need to work for 12 hours to get one game. Ok you say.... but if you also buy clothes, food, etc then you see £60 is a lot! And that's just for 1 game!
Sonic
> Dan is right the quality of the launch games on the N64 was too
> high, Mario64 and many of Nintendos other games scared many third
> party developers away. For most N64 owners the first games they
> bought were Mario64, MarioKart64 and Goldeneye...that was £180
> worth of quality gaming...before any other games would ever get
> bought.
That meant the N64 didnt attract the support it needed
> for longterm success. Perhaps this is why Nintendo has not shown
> the big new Mario title yet!
ummmmmmm.... not quite! As someone said, the President of Ninty officially announced that NO ONE except Ninty would be allowed to produce games for the 64 at first! So, many developers went to sony. When dev kits did come out, they were far less well supported by ninty than sony supported their developers.... so they lost more developers. Finally, ninty used the cart format, and charged huge royalties... and that was the end of the 64!
As for the launch titles of the N64 being so good... rubbish! The 64 was released only with ONE GAME in Japan! No doubt some of you will say this is one of the most revolutioary games ever (agreed), but(!) the PSX already had a library of hundreds of games! ONE GAME WILL NOT HOLD A CONSOLES SALE UP! Added to this, 3 months after the N64s release in Japan, only 4 games were available!
Now, all this meant poor sales in japan... which meant that EVEN MORE developers abandoned ninty.
great
Sonic
For me, Goldeneye came with the N64, Mario 64 and Mario Kart both second hand for £20 each.
N64 games were a little over priced when they first came out at £60 each but that's another lesson Nintendo has learned.
The Gamecube ones will be no more than £40 (roughly the same as the PS2 games)
Those titles were the first 3 I bought. 2 years after the console was released.
That meant the N64 didnt attract the support it needed for longterm success. Perhaps this is why Nintendo has not shown the big new Mario title yet!
Nintendo at this stage in the launch have many many developer kits to more companies then Sony did for this stage during the Playstation 2's pre-launch.
:-D
Nintendo diliberately kept the third parties out of the way during the first couple of months to make bigger profits.
This backfired and they've now learnt their lesson.
Do you see?
:P
There were also other reason that put companies off like the cartriges and how the N64 was hard to make games for.
These problems don't exist on the Gamecube and Nintendo are doing everything in their power to get other devellopers working on their machine.
Anyway, Sony aren't much better for the third partys this time round.
The PS2 is incredibly difficult, expensive, and awkward to make games for. Only Sony can't make their own killer games to make up for it.
The moment the likes of Konami and Square decide to triple their profits by releasing their games on all systems (Konami have already started doing this), Sony have had it.