Do you see downloadable games and applications replacing retail in the future?
I do think downloadable will become the future of the industry. I don’t know whether it will happen in the next console generation or it will be a couple of console generations before they’re solely download services, but it’s definitely going to become developer’s main focus in the future.
Part of it is it makes piracy a lot harder. If you look at the Xbox 360, because the whole console is permanently online, and Microsoft can detect if you’ve hacked pirated games and therefore ban you from Xbox live, the user then has to decide whether he/she wants to download games and play them online, or pirate them. If I’m pirating them, I’m losing out on all this amazing other stuff you could be doing with the console. I think that’s very clever and I think future manufacturers are really looking at that.
And then you’ve got the other side of the situation where video game shops trade in a lot of games – you can go in with an old game and they will sell it again. For EB and JB Hi-Fi, it’s great because they’re selling the same game twice – they pay Nintendo for the original copy and then buy it back from the user and sell it again for a good profit – so they get almost twice as much money. But the games developer and publisher only make one sale. A lot of the publishers want to stop that market.
What are the sales like for downloadable games and applications?
I’m not quite sure why, but console manufacturers are very strict on us releasing figures, but as an example, EA announced they sold 20,000 units of a Burnout game on Playstation Network in its first month of release, and we’ve done comparable figures in less than a month for MyNotebook Blue [one of three notepad applications developed by Nnooo] on DsiWare. That’s as specific as I can be.
So that’s considered a success for a download title?
Yes, definitely. We needed to sell less than 20,000 units to break even across the whole line of MyNotebooks – Blue, Red and Green for development costs, so within two weeks we’d paid back development costs, and now we’re well past that.
What are some of the difficulties with operating in a new market such as downloadable games and applications?
Budget is really difficult. And it’s making sure – especially at the outset – that we have a product we know we can achieve and get out within a time limit, and that we don’t spend all the money at once and have to close the company down. If you’ve got enough experience and know what it is you want to do, and as long as you’re realistic about what you want to achieve, most of these problems can be resolved.
