Echoing recent comments by Codemasters, the CEO of Namco Bandai has also candidly stated that selling full games is old hat and that games should really be nothing but vehicles for DLC.
Namco Bandai Holdings CEO Shukuo Ishikawa spoke about the role of DLC strategy:
Selling a game only once for $70-$80 [typical Japanese prices] is no good at all. If you sell it for $25, or even give it away free, then you can sell episodes and items online. They’ll soon be dropping $10 or $20 on these, and you can also do monthly charges.”
Of course, Namco Bandai already has a reputation as being a master of this venerable strategy, not that this seems to have helped their recent financial performance.
…And about those “Tales of Unemployment” and “Tales of Bankruptcy” puns I was talking about…
Something like that is really hard to appeal to someone. I don’t see that working, not here in America at least.
JEW
I didn’t want to go too offtopic on other, more recent game news just to post this, so I decided on posting it here: according to VGChartz, perfect Star Ocean 4 sales are way below the original 360 beta, even on Japan.
Compare http://www.vgchartz.com/game.php?id=23447 with http://www.vgchartz.com/game.php?id=39111
No…you battle piracy by…ignoring it….. you put in place basic protections to keep the majority of the masses from copying it easily. Wasting millions to get thousands in profits is ridiculous…..and should remain the way the music industry dose things!