20 Titles At Revolution Launch

Next Generation reports that NOA's George Harrison expects there to be 20 titles for the system at the Revolution launch. From the article: "The other thing we recognized is that you really make your reputation in the first year ... You've got to deliver software, not just at launch, but you've got to deliver software in the first six to nine months after launch. It has to be solid software. In GameCube, we didn't have that, we had kind of a drought for six months after it launched. By that time your reputation starts to solidify and it's hard to reverse that after awhile."

That's nice

[Silent sound]

But it's quality, not quantity. The XBox 360 had about 26 titles or something, but most of them were ports and crappy generic EA sports games. That won't cut it on the Revolution, especially because I don't think Nintendo has that much of the sports games fan market. We will have to wait to see how many of these 20 titles are "for real" and how many are, shovelware.

Re:That's nice

[be-fan]

I hate the "quality not quantity" mantra. That's the main reason why post-SNES Nintendo game libraries have sucked so hard. It totally eliminates the variety of titles that make a system worth owning.

Re:That's nice

[sm4kxd]

You know that Katamari Damacy was created by Namco, and has only graced Sony platforms, and that neither of these entities is in any way Nintendo, right?

Re:That's nice

[Dr. Eggman]

...And how many of them will be tweaked versions of old games on the Virtual Console.

Variety

[Silent sound]

Quantity doesn't mean variety, though. For example, let's say a system gets five Madden NFL Football games. This is definitely at least some quantity. But it isn't any variety at all.

On the other hand, a game library with 20 titles but no variety... well, I don't know what we can say about how much quantity it has, but regardless of the quality of the individual games, that isn't what I'd call a quality launch library. Variety effects quality directly, because most people get bored if they wind up having to play the exact same kind of game over and over.

And you can't possibly say quality over quantity "[made] the post-SNES game libraries suck so hard", because quality over quantity is absolutely not something that describes the Playstation 2 game library at all...

Re:OFFICIAL List of the 20 games

[twoallbeefpatties]

If every incarnation of Mario Kart, Zelda, and Metroid wasn't worth playing, then I would be offended by that. But if that really was the launch list, then who's to say it wouldn't be worth it?

About 1/3 of the games will be First Party Titles

[LoverOfJoy]

Nintendo seems to put out a high ratio of high-quality fun games. If they are putting out a third of the games it wouldn't surprise me if they make as many great games as all the third party developers combined...maybe 4 great Nintendo-made games and 4 great third party games. If it comes out that way, I'd consider it a great signal-to-noise ratio compared to others systems. I don't think most people would spend money for more games than that at launch if they really are great games that don't get dull fast. Then if you add in all the old favorites that are downloadable and you've really got staying power.

Re:Variety

[be-fan]

My point was to compare the PS* libraries to the N64 and Gamecube libraries. With the N64 and beyond, Nintendo's mantra "was quality not quantity". For me, that meant a bunch of highly rated games (the Zelda series, the Mario series and its spin-offs, the Metroid series), that I had zero interest in playing. The PS*'s library is like the SNES's. You like arcade flight simulators? You've got a dozen to choose from. You like Japanese-style RPG? You have several dozen. You like first person shooters? Line them up. Sure, a lot of them are mediocre, and some are just bad, but there are a lot of good ones too, and I'd rather play a mediocre game in a genre I like then a steller game in a genre I don't.