Nintendo Has Known About This...

I'm thinking about all the games that Nintendo has "ported" to other platforms (their own typically). Think about how many places you can play the original Mario. NES, SNES, GBA, and soon the Wii. What you need are games that people want to play again. I think he's right that the online bit is going to be a revolutionary thing. MS, Nintendo, and Sony are all planning it. I think where MS has it wrong is that you have to pay a subscription just so you can spend money, but that will probably go bye-bye once the Wii and PS3 are released.

But beyond just being able to deliver a game to multiple locations, you need a model that is scalable. You have your block-buster movies, you have your budget and indy films. You need a model that supports the whole gamut. It would be even better if there was a way for the game industry to tap more readily into the work on Open Source Software (OSS). Game developers right now must often make their own tech repeatedly. Just like if film makers had to repeadely design how the film goes in the camera.

'Games industry business model does not work' - Ward // GamesIndustry.biz

"Right now this industry has a business model that does not work. This industry has been flat for the past six years; we've been selling games to the same people. Our revenue model is based on one shot at retail - we have no back-end revenue streams like a movie might in terms of DVD, TV, that type of thing."


Ward sees a huge opportunity in the nascent online model, though, particularly in the console space and believes the rest of the publishing community should throw its full weight behind initiatives like Microsoft's Xbox Live, insisting this is exactly "what the industry needs".


"We need to develop that back-end revenue stream - that can be done only online with transactions and subscriptions, all those kinds of business models," he explained.