Nintendo is not only a Japanese company, it is a Kyoto-based company. For people who aren’t familiar, Kyoto-based are to Japanese companies as Japanese companies are to US companies. They’re very traditional, and very focused on hierarchy and group decision making. Unfortunately, that creates a culture where everyone is an advisor and no one is a decision maker – but almost everyone has veto power.
If you read Patrick McKenzie's recent article on "Doing Business in Japan" you can get some better context of just how rigid these 'Kyoto-based' must be:
FWIW, I've heard the same thing, verbatim, about Nagoya companies. Just like every town in Japan thinks that it is the one that discovered that great water makes great soba and great sake, and that all other towns' soba and sake is deficient due to lack of the proper water for it, I think it may be possible that every town in Japan not-so-secretly believes that only their companies are still Japanese and that all other Japanese companies have succumbed to weird foreign influence.
I work with companies both in Kyoto and Tokyo and honestly there's not so MUCH of a difference between them. It depends much more of the company culture than the location in my experience. You can get over-conservative companies in Tokyo as well. As for the whole paragraph about Nintendo's company culture, it sounds very much like every other Japanese company out there (no individual leadership, everything through the group, veto from top managers) and nothing specific to video games businesses.
I have trouble even listing large Kyoto based companies other than Kyocera and Nintendo. (Hatena is the only prominent web services company there, but it is much smaller).
The reputation I heard from inside japan when I lived and worked there wads that of "weirdness" rather than being necessarily more heirichical. I don't think it's a linear "even more Japanese compared to USA standards" thing going on. They're known for being more cultish and wacky in their own ways, like Kyocera employees' fanatical effort into their annual all company sports tournament.
I can see how this weirdness and cultishness might be seen as being "more hierarchical" from a non domestic person's eyes though.
All this really is is "I don't work in head office" syndrome. Generally everyone outside head office is either aware of how opaque the goings on are or they have been deluded by the koolaid.
Western companies are just as bad in these respects as their Japanese counterparts.
A fair amount of the interview is dedicated to Nintendo's eShop and how its pricing, release schedule, and promotions are determined by Nintendo's market research--as well as company culture. It also brings up a study I'd not heard of before, that says game demos significantly lower sales ( http://www.computerandvideogames.com/416824/ ).
I think it's an interesting read for anyone involved in digital marketplaces or who offers free trials of their product.
I also found the assertion about demos interesting, and it seemed somewhat unintuitive to me. I can think of two possible reasons for the correlation:
1. Demos provide enough of the gameplay to satisfy your curiosity
2. Demos let you discover that you won't like a game without buying it
However, I'm not convinced that the sales study actually includes enough data to establish correlation at all. Simply breaking down sales into groups (trailer/demo+trailer/demo/nothing) overlooks other differentiators that can have a major impact on sales.
The biggest one to my mind is simply the budget of a game. An indie game has no chance of selling equivalent units to a AAA game with a giant marketing budget. A demo may seem more prudent to an indie developer (or not), since it can be done on spec rather than requiring money to actually change hands. Yet, demo or not, it will never touch the sales level of a trailer-only AAA game. A more informative study would account for these factors.
For that data to be even remotely useful, they need to look at how long time do people spend playing the game, and customer satisfaction. I do not doubt that proper demos make people buy less games, but on the other hand you have less disgruntled customers because they didn't spend 60€ on a game that isn't very good.
I seriously cannot understand why any console maker doesn't go all out and focus on the customer. Tell publishers to either make a reasonable demo, or accept that people buy the game and can get a refund if they've played it less than an hour.
>I seriously cannot understand why any console maker doesn't go all out and focus on the customer. Tell publishers to either make a reasonable demo,
Ouya used to require every game to have a demo or to be free-to-play. They ditched it[1]. I believe MS still has the mandatory demo on Xbox live arcade (digital only games) but only for the 360 titles, they allow publishers to decide for the XB1 [2]. I cannot possibly know their reasons but my guess is that demos are expensive to make. Giving a refund has not been tried as far as I know but Sony had something similar with one hour limited full games for free. I believe they stopped releasing these few years ago. Again, I don't know their reasons but my guess is that it was not driving a significant number of additional sales.
Right now you can Share Play on the PS4 and watch game streams everywhere so the utility of demos is even less than in the 7th generation consoles.
It is kind of maddening, considering that consoles now know all of this metadata about your usage. Digital purchases should have a number of improvements over a physical purchase, but that hasn't really happened and perhaps it never will.
It doesn't seem that unreasonable to expect:
- Reduced cost, since there is one fewer middleman, no breakage or unsold inventory and no shipping (although it must be said that the costs to serve game downloads is not really that much cheaper than storefronts)
- Trial periods or return windows, as hvidgaard mentioned
- Resale and gifting
These all seem like missed opportunities to me. Developers bemoan the used game market, because it means that a game which 10 million people played only pays them for 2 million copies. Oh, and they have to provide support and services to all 10 million people or reap the whirlwind.
Rather than try to get sales to 10 million units (which will never happen for various reasons), how about 4 million? I guess there will always be someone saying "well, if we just didn't allow digital sales to have return windows..."
Nintendo has a young audience. I think of being at the mall with the kids, letting them loose on the coin machines for ten minutes, but not putting any money in.
I'm not surprised that demos lower sales, since in my personal experience, most games are just terrible and demos don't change that, they only remind me of that fact before I buy a game. (And I don't even buy games anymore because I've learned my lesson. Now I'll just make any game I want to play.)
If you read Patrick McKenzie's recent article on "Doing Business in Japan" you can get some better context of just how rigid these 'Kyoto-based' must be:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/