1845137043 (N) by Rebecca Levene

Author:Rebecca Levene [Levene, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781781311073
Publisher: Aurum Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

How to Crack the Console Market

The British games industry had prospered during its years of near isolation, but the protection that isolation offered also had a flip side: British developers had been commercially and creatively dislocated from foreign markets. British and American home gaming in particular grew separately, and along different paths. America, the world’s biggest games market, always had a closer relationship with home games consoles – dedicated devices in which the games load instantly from chunky plastic cartridges. Although they were on sale around the world, they were more popular, for longer, in the United States. And so, for a while, the markets on either side of the Atlantic used different machines, and were slightly out of phase. While Britons were starting to play games on the ZX Spectrum, American children were already tiring of their Atari 2600s and Intellivisions.

The consoles had been the foundation of the American games industry, but the software was managed badly. Between poor-quality games forced upon retailers, and a gold rush of independent publishers, the value fell out of the market, and by 1983 sellers were discounting games to a small fraction of their suggested price. There is a legend, repeated often and with a grain of truth, that Atari commissioned an E.T. game at hectically short notice for a Christmas 1982 release, and manufactured more copies than could possibly be sold. Unwilling to release a tide of cheap titles onto a failing market, the company eventually buried millions of unsold cartridges, including E.T., in a New Mexico landfill.

Consoles never disappeared from the world’s second biggest games market, though. From 1983, both the hardware and the games in Japan had been dominated by the manufacturer Nintendo. They had found legal and technological ruses to keep control over their console’s software, protecting the value of both the games and the company. But compared to the free-wheeling businesses fostered by home computing, console games looked very controlled, even closed. If the American market was out of step with British developers, Nintendo’s grip on the console hardware looked completely impenetrable.

As Codemasters grew during the eighties, David Darling became a regular visitor to trade shows in the US, and spotted that while American developers were writing games for the Amiga and Atari ST, they weren’t reflecting the buying trends of the public. ‘We noticed this because when we used to go to CES shows in America,’ he recalls, ‘even when you’re driving down the street you would see NES games at gas stations – it had taken over the culture.’

Consoles are technologically similar to computers, but they are very different as a business. Computer makers might hope that a thriving games market for their machine will boost sales, but they have no financial interest in or control over it – their profit is made from their hardware, and they compete to produce the best machine for a price consumers will pay. But the console business revolves around controlling the software market. The manufacturers – Nintendo, Sega and

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