game consoles

Yesterday I found myself made to play the latest in a long series of fighting games based off young adult Japanese comic book series, most of which I don't particularly care for. It felt like what I imagine non-Nintendo fans feel trying to play Super Smash Brothers, except in a world where Mario never was a household name. The game itself, "Jump Super Plus Victory Versus Ultra Stars" (or whatever), I wasn't particularly interested in to begin with, and it didn't redeem itself with gameplay.

The mechanics of how technology is built and marketed leads to the inevitable formation of walled garden ecosystems. When an entity is large enough, it becomes viable for other smaller entities to make money through their technical compatibility with the larger entity. The former is known as a "platform" and the latter an "app". The actions and policies of the platform determines what kinds of services, behaviors, and cross-platform compatibilities are easy, hard, or impossible to achieve.

So thanks to the recent eShop release of Metroid Prime I've had a chance to experience FPS controls on a Wii remote, and I have to say it's probably the best you'll see on a console. With sensitivity turned up to "Advanced" you have a rough approximation of mouse aiming that more than does the job, even without the generous auto-aim that this particular game came with. I honestly think this was a much better step forward for gaming than the successor, the Wii U's unwieldy tablet controller thing.

The economics of game development are completely unhinged from the way they're monetized. When you go and buy a game you're told that they're very expensive, that they're going to be $60 (or regional equivalent) a piece and that you should keep hold of them because they are most certainly valuable objects. But the cost to make those copies is actually zero - ever since the beginning of the CD era distribution costs have slowly fell to the point where, with digital distribution, the cost to actually ship a file to your machine with the game on it is on the order of pennies per copy.

Upcoming furvor over the new console hardware has boiled over into the Internet's usual escape resovoirs of arguments and hipster contrarian counter-arguments. Specifically, the idea that console hardware will now attach digital-style, non-transferrable licensing to packaged products, ostensibly to counteract actions on behalf of certain retailers to cut game publishers and developers out of their revenue stream through selling used games. More specifically: screw GameStop, we're not letting you give your games to other people.

There are two incredibly effective marketing techniques both involving the creation of throw-away value propositions to get someone to accept another, related value proposition. The first one is the foot-in-the-door technique, where the throw-away proposition is relatively non-committal, and the related proposition is more involved. The idea is that getting someone to accept the throw-away proposition mentally prepares them to accept the later related one; since the person already has dealt with you, there's less transaction anxiety.