Our First Retraction: DS Titles Under Development - Not Launch. What is “Launch” anyway?

Posted by Jason

August 4, 2004

Wow, the world of journalism. Yesterday we posted the story Nintendo DS Launch Titles - Full List when we were half awake (you may have noticed by the tone of the story alone). We truly apologize for our inaccuracy on the matter. The titles listed are not launch titles, just a list of titles under development at the current time.

Don’t get us wrong, we’d love to see 70 some odd titles at launch. But in our most humble of opinions, that would actually prove to be a bad thing in the long run. Launch titles are just that, launch titles. They typically show the merits of what the new system can do, and only a few really have solid gameplay behind them. The ones that do are usually developed by first party developers and have had significantly more time with the development kits than third party developers. Sometimes third party publishers have to port (gasp!) a successful game from a previous system just to have a title available at a system’s launch.

System launches usually happen with 15 or fewer titles. The exception being the systems that have backward compatibility with past systems, and I can’t in my right mind qualify those as launch titles. With just a handful of games available at launch, most those titles sell out (especially if they are good) and we see a drought of a couple of months before we start seeing new games on the shelves. As gamers, we had enough to wet our appetite and we are forced to wait for the next set of new games (there will always be ports) to be published. The next round of releases come out, and most of those games fly off the shelves too. The launch was successful, new developers/publishers sign on, and games get published on a regular basis.

For gamers, 70 games at launch would be a dream come true. But on the business end of things, it could really hurt. If there were less than twenty games at launch, most gamers could realistically purchase or rent a large percentage of the title base before the next round is published. This puts money back in the publishers pockets and encourages them to produce more games of high quality. With 70 plus games available, it would be very difficult for gamers to get their hands on a large percentage of those games. Developers would only get watered down profits from the launch, and be discouraged to get anything new out for the system any time soon.

Having a successful launch is not only crucial to the hardware makers, but also to the developers and publishers. If a system launch flops (N-Gage, NGPC, SegaCD, 3D0, and many others), publishers are reluctant to release new games, even ports for that matter, as doing so would lose money immediately. Sometimes increasing the library of games works well and increases the user base of the system, and sometimes it doesn’t work as planned (and that’s too bad because they usually are quality systems).

Sorry to rant for so long about a drone subject like launch logistics. But with Sony and Nintendo trying to make it into a calculated science, it should prove an interesting discussion of what works and what doesn’t in the least.

Also, to update on the Nintendo DS list we published yesterday, Nintendo themselves came out later last night and announced the same list, for the most part, of titles in development. So, it is official. At least we got that right.

Cheers!

Tags: