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Shigeru Miyamoto: Nintendo Will 'Continue Pushing' for Pay-Once Mobile Games Over Freemium Apps

Googlyhead said:
Such a one-time philosophy would be nice.
I've been put off from buying a Switch simply because there have been games released with "season pass" type stuff, and I've had enough of that with the Xbone and PS4 (also infecting earlier systems).

It's the first Nintendo system I haven't bought, although technically the "money for nothing" issue was on 3DS titles too.
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Just from my side, I agree that season pass content is a stupid idea, but I have to tell you, the games themselves are REALLY solid. The season pass content, consistently, is garbage so you would get along just fine with a Switch and just the base titles. Some of the games are 60 bucks and can give you a decent 50-70 hours, but a SP for 30 bucks giving an extra 3 hours of content isn't a value at all, so it's worth ignoring them.
 
Ironically, the only way to "buy" Nintendo games is through in-app purchases so that family sharing doesn't apply. Talk about nickel and diming! If you're going to charge full prices for games, then charge it for the game itself and not via in-app purchases. Hypocrite!
 
Googlyhead said:
Such a one-time philosophy would be nice.
I've been put off from buying a Switch simply because there have been games released with "season pass" type stuff, and I've had enough of that with the Xbone and PS4 (also infecting earlier systems).
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Uh... what? I have several games for my Switch.

Zelda has a "Season Pass" - really it was just a one time $20 for some DLC. It adds in ~15% more content to the game than what there was to start with. Totally optional - you won't feel anything is missing at all if you don't buy it (although I think the best boss fight of the entire game is part of that added content.) The game also came to the Wii U, and I believe they have the exact same DLC available in that version of the game.

Mario and Rabbids Kingdom Battle (that's the title, just one game, not two), also has a bundle of DLC that they call a "Season Pass", but you can buy all the DLC separately. Same deal as Zelda - the game is complete without it and you won't feel you're missing anything at all if you don't buy it. I didn't buy that, but I did buy a set of extra levels. The extra levels were subpar compared to the rest of the game - I got the sense that they were levels considered for the main game, but cut from it for one reason or another.

I have numerous other games for the Switch as well. None of the rest offer any form of paid DLC that I'm aware of.
 
shareef777 said:
Ironically, the only way to "buy" Nintendo games is through in-app purchases so that family sharing doesn't apply. Talk about nickel and diming! If you're going to charge full prices for games, then charge it for the game itself and not via in-app purchases. Hypocrite!
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agreed
 
Miyamoto, one of my true childhood heroes that I never grew out of!!! he is the best! Freemium is utter garbage. Those are not games they are sedatives (ok an over generalisation but you get my point).

Don't forget that he isn't the CEO of Nintendo and that he doesn't call the shots there.
 
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Put your money where your mouth is then? Except for Super Mario Run everything Nintendo released for iOS so far are freemium.
 
Googlyhead said:
Is that not the worst possible situation from all viewpoints?
Customers (players) worry about time spent (and are put off or unable to enjoy).
Game design suffers due to incentive to make interaction take more time and effort.
Overall result being not just grinding with (some) effort, but actually just sitting around doing nothing.
And eliminates income from those who would throw money at IAPs
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I don't think so.
Players don't worry about time spent any more than before. They know what they pay and they'll see what they get in excahnge.
If designers try to slow down the gaming experience, players will play other games. Since there is no money invested in certain game, you can change anytime. Have you ever kept watching bad movie on Netflix, because you already paid for it?
Maybe my point is too "scandinavian" ie. focusing on equality, but I think freemium is the worst thing to gaming. Suddenly you can suck in gaming, but buy yourself to go up. A bit same that you could buy points in NBA game.
Parents worry that how much their kids need to spend money on games to be popular.
Gamers that really try to be good get frustrated when somebody "buye them out".

Freemium is compelling to designers, since lots of people try the game and some might pay huge amounts playing that game.
The old method of shareware where you can try first and then buy has pretty much gone.
So in addition to freemium there there's two choices: pay all in front or pay as much as you like the game. I think measuring how much you like the game is pretty nicely calculated by the time you play it.

The netflix model if good only when you use it a lot. Or there's more people like in the family. So paying for personal games with monthly fee isn't option for them that play them only now and then. But these times when we are always connected "games-as-a-service" is possible and attractive. And it is technically yeasy to charge per second, minute, hour, day, etc.
 
First of all, technically Mario Run is a freemium game too, it gives you the first 1-3 levels (can't remember exactly) for free and then you pay an IAP to unlock the full game.

Secondly, Mario Run's failure has nothing to do with the "pay once" structure, it has to do with the cost!
When it was announced they were bringing Mario to iOS, people were expecting a TRUE Mario game; even if it was just a port of one of their old Super Mario games from the 1980's, it doesn't matter, as long as it was a true Mario game then people would have been happy.
Instead, people were given yet another endless runner AND on top of that, charged $10 for it! Ten dollars for an endless runner? That's insane!
To make matters worse, they disallowed family sharing and threw in some BS always-on Internet requirement, making the game useless if you're traveling without any internet/connection, or for whatever other reason you don't have any Internet.
I don't know why Nintendo is trying to play dumb about this, when they already admitted they know it was the pricing that ruined the game, which is why they sent out those polls to select people shortly after release, asking them what they think a fair PRICE would be for the game.

At the end of the day, if they had brought an actual Mario game to iOS - again even if it was just a port of an old game - and charged $5 for it without the always-on Internet requirement, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
 
oneMadRssn said:
If you get ~350 IAP-paying freemium players to play your game, that's an easy $100,000/yr revenue (obv setting aside costs and app store fees). That's it! Only a few hundred is all it takes. You would need to sell 20,000 $5 paid games per year to make the same amount.
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Apple charges 30%, so that leaves us with 70%, or 3.5usd; then you need to spend on marketing if you want to actually sell it to real people, and that is VERY expensive, so that's another 30% (or more), then if you have to connect to the cloud that's another 15% on servers (or more), then third party services like analytics, mkting extras, etc, you end up with about 40% or less and we have not taken into account the cost of actually creating the app, so you'll end up with like 20% or less as revenue from the 3.5usd = 7 cents per sale BEFORE taxes, so in reality you only get over 4.5 cents (or less) per sale.

So you'll actually need to sell 300 000 or more to make just 100k a year. And that's anything but easy.
 
rafark said:
Apple charges 30%, so that leaves us with 70%, or 3.5usd; then you need to spend on marketing if you want to actually sell it to real people, and that is VERY expensive, so that's another 30% (or more), then if you have to connect to the cloud that's another 15% on servers (or more), then third party services like analytics, mkting extras, etc, you end up with about 40% or less and we have not taken into account the cost of actually creating the app, so you'll end up with like 20% or less as revenue from the 3.5usd = 7 cents per sale BEFORE taxes, so in reality you only get over 4.5 cents (or less) per sale.

So you'll actually need to sell 300 000 or more to make just 100k a year. And that's anything but easy.
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Yes, totally. Overhead is a real thing.

I was basically working on the assumption that the overhead for a IAP game is approximately comparable to that of a paid game. In other words, for purposes of this rough back-of-the-napkin comparison of IAP freemium games and paid games, you can cancel them out.

On the contrary, I meant to point out the differences.
 
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rafark said:
Apple charges 30%, so that leaves us with 70%, or 3.5usd; then you need to spend on marketing if you want to actually sell it to real people, and that is VERY expensive, so that's another 30% (or more), then if you have to connect to the cloud that's another 15% on servers (or more), then third party services like analytics, mkting extras, etc, you end up with about 40% or less and we have not taken into account the cost of actually creating the app, so you'll end up with like 20% or less as revenue from the 3.5usd = 7 cents per sale BEFORE taxes, so in reality you only get over 4.5 cents (or less) per sale.

So you'll actually need to sell 300 000 or more to make just 100k a year. And that's anything but easy.
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70 and 45 cents, I guess?
 
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