This week’s episode takes a look at this week’s Gaming Flashback, Viva Pinata.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
The game industry is doing “okay” in this bad economic time compared to other industries. Primarily, Nintendo is rocking the house with their games, hand-held’s and consoles while mobile developers are showing some great successes in the industry. Many success stories in our industry are based on small titles, downloadable games of the more “casual” style while a few larger titles are experiencing slower than expected sales trends.
We’ve mentioned this in the past, but the tough economy gives many smaller developers great opportunities for success. While big publishers struggle to look good in the eyes of the investor, tiny developers can produce quality titles for minimal cash investment and time to market. Ten years ago, smaller developers tried to compete with the big boys making larger titles, cloning successful titles or simply asking investors to put it on the line for their game. Today, developers can create a small iphone app, a cute WiiWare title or exploit the XNA efforts of Microsoft for Xbox Live Arcade and actually have a chance.
There are still challenges with these smaller developers when working in the WiiWare and XBLA publishing channels, your game marketing and promotion becomes highly reliant on Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony for PSN. Tom Prata, senior director of Nintendo of America talked to Gamespot about this issue:
“Finally, there’s the problem of promotion. It’s not enough to make a great game if nobody notices it. Prata specifically said Nintendo will be devoting more resources to support the promotion and development of WiiWare games in the future.” (gamespot)
Of course, in the world of smaller game titles and downloadable casual games, you’re going to be at risk of finding a lot of “shovelware” — products that are only released to make a quick dime, often based on some license or popular theme/character. The great game titles will, hopefully, rise to the top and show themselves off amongst all the wanna-be money makers.
Those smaller developers putting a huge passion into their titles actually have a chance in this new industry trend. Game makers, internationally, now have a chance to grasp a small piece of the industry and make their dreams come true. The core audience may see this as a trend of noisly low quality titles, but I believe the industry needs this change to grow a new generation of developers based on niche interests.
While many can wait for their next release of Madden the rest of us will continue to spend a little money to see what the future innovators are going to be bringing to the table.
This episode follows the landmark 500th episode, and this next episode is dominated by Nintendo, both in the news and looking back at the Gaming Flashback for Wii Music and the infamous E3 performance starring Reggie Fils-Aime and Cammie Dunaway.
The news includes:
All of this and Listener Feedback.
This week, we are running an outtakes episode, part of it long conversations that were cut from previous episodes, while others are just bloopers.
In fact, the first thirty-five minutes or so of the outtakes is Jonah and Jordan discussing news items waiting for Paul to login that didn’t make the cut for the podcast. Other interesting bits is Jonah and Paul talking about pen and paper RPGs and how badly the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons stinks, and Paul and Jordan berating stores that put up their Christmas decorations a few months early.
Next week, we’ll have a regular podcast, but this week, enjoy the outtakes.
