Thursday, August 13, 2009

╠ It's the small things that matter ╣

The market of portable gaming faces one huge issue, software piracy. This is especially prominent in Australia because release dates between our games and America's can be quite broad. The ability of consumers to download your game and not pay for it is a huge issue that the players in the market have to deal with. This is even more of a problem for the PSP as it doesn't have the casual gamer market to keep it afloat.

The thing that annoys me is the lack of innovation in attracting gamers to actually purchase a game. One example of someone doing it right is my favourite game company Square Enix, who with their new big game Dissidia are offering a bunch of free stuff in a collectors edition. Most of it is probably useless junk, but at the POS it looked pretty so I put down my preorder, and it seemed other people had chosen the same option as there were 60 pre-reg's just at the store I went to.

Gaming companies seem to be too happy to sit back and wait for Sony or Nintendo to fix the problem, but as a competitor in the market they too have power and should be aiming to follow this culture and try to add incentive that can't simply just be downloaded.

If there is a problem in your market you should always be trying to innovate your way around it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

100% agreed. At times there seems to be little point to purchasing a game, that said, I tend to be happy to fork out an additional $30-40 for the extra pretty stuff such as concept art / gallery booklets etc that come with special editions.