Daring Fireball: Tits and Apps
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Developers hated doing business with Nintendo. Nintendo put every game through a rigorous review process, and stripped out anything that they found objectionable. This castrated a lot of games like Mortal Kombat and Final Fight, and ensured that some titles never came to market at all.
Nintendo also charged a licensing fee, and ensured that only licensed games could be played. In order to distribute games, publishers had to buy the cartridges from Nintendo at pretty hefty prices.
This system worked great until Sony came along, and told publishers that they'd cut a better deal. Much more relaxed terms, and a far fewer restrictions on content. Suddenly, developers migrated en masse to the Playstation. Square became Sony-only. Capcom suddenly concentrated on Playstation games like Metal Gear Solid. All of a sudden, all the big new games were Playstation exclusives, and the only big games for N64 were Nintendo's own first-party titles. At the time, it felt like a switch had been flipped.
I feel a similar dynamic starting to play out with the App Store and Android. History seldom repeats itself, but it tends to rhyme.
Starting with the Wii Nintendo has significantly loosened their requirements for publishing games on their platforms. The Wii SDK is much cheaper (almost an order of magnitude) than either the Xbox or PS3 dev kits, the from what I can tell approval processes are far less onerous.
What has resulted? A deluge of crap. The amount of cheap shovelware games for the Wii boggles the mind, and dilutes the Wii brand significantly. It gets so bad that even non-gamer grandmas have noticed.
In comparison, Sony and MS are riding high, they have a gigantic amount of 3rd party support, people are willing to pay their ticket price for entry to the platform, and willing to put up with a lot more content restrictions (e.g., no free DLC, extensive multiplay/connectivity requirements even for singleplayer games)
There's a fine line to be walked here, and I'm not sure if Android has the model right either.
Look at the game sales charts on The Magic Box. NDS and Wii games dominate the top 20, and have been doing so for years. There's simply no comparison.
It's really hard to make the argument that Nintendo's screwing up here. If anything, facts seem to support the argument that loose licensing requirements leads to dominance.
Though, I suspect they do actually make money on the Wii. The sheer number of crappy games coming out for the Wii would indicate that the 'market' believes these crappy games will sell enough to get a decent ROI.
This leaves one of two possibilities:
A) You made up your previous fact.
B) These third parties are all to dumb to realize that making these games isn't making them any money.
I'm betting on A.
C) The profitability of these games are reliant on a unsustainable pattern, or by itself contributes negatively to sustained profit. Say you were a knockoff manufacturer for expensive watches, and you were for some reason able to get your goods into the official distribution channel for real watches - this is an extremely profitable situation for you. Then everyone figures out how you're making money hand over fist and starts doing it too, and soon consumer confidence in the quality of the watches drops through the floor, and nobody (real or knockoff) makes any money. This is a very real possibility Nintendo faces. The profitability of shovelware relies on consumer confidence of products in the channel in general, and the market has a definite carrying capacity for shit games - exceeding this risks the viability of the platform entirely.
For such an important piece of Android, the Marketplace is remarkably shitty.
The biggest annoyance for me WRT Andorid apps is the complete chaos in the SD card root directory. It's a free for all, with no naming conventions or directory structure whatsoever. I hide most of my files in a couple of folders like _music, _video etc. so they float to the top of the cruft when mounted - otherwise I'd be afraid they'd be clobbered by some app's random directory choice.
True, but OTOH, you don't need it. You can locate apps reviewed and recommended on Web sites, and install using a qrcode.
I'd still like to see the marketplace improved. Given that there are few restrictions on what gets in there, having some better search and filtering tools would be a big win.
Maybe Google needs to buy a search company ...
If Apple ever ends up without a device that doesn't support what's universally understood to be The Next Big Thing (Nintendo didn't like the disc format mostly because it was easy to pirate) while the Android vendors do have it, the analogy would be much more apt.
First, a (very) slight correction. Piracy was a factor, but the N64 also didn't support CD-ROM because Nintendo was addicted to the control and revenue that the cartridge system gave them. The N64 cartridges had lockout chips preventing unlicensed software, similar to the NES carts. They even strengthened the system with a checksum calculated at boot.
I think Apple might be approaching a similar tipping point with things like Flash and Google Voice. These are obviously features that consumers want, but Apple is too addicted to their control over the platform.
Google Voice could maybe be The Next Big Thing, but Apple can still (technically) get on that train. Much different than the hardware constraints facing Nintendo when the cd-rom format took off.
It will be interesting to see what happens, for sure. My sense is this: Apple has hit on something with iPad that is similar to what Nintendo has found with Wii. That is, a whole base of users -- perhaps comparable in size to the current market! -- that actively ignores the existing offerings as much as they possibly can because they dislike them. These things that we love, they hate! So, inasmuch as they can give those users an experience they enjoy (in contrast to what they're used to), I think they'll be very successful.
They're clearly very confident in the user interface and surrounding factors they've built. From my anecdotal experience of the types of people who I think are likely to represent the largest market for the iPad (and unlikely to buy anything else except reluctantly, if they must), Apple's control of the App Store thus far is utterly irrelevant. Perhaps it "should" be relevant to them. And perhaps I "should" know more about how my car works or how the vegetables at my local supermarket were grown/transported. But I don't.
Now, if users find themselves frustrated, feeling left out because their friends are enjoying Flash apps that they can't, that could be a problem.
The question, then, is: how many of these users will be willing to give up their iPads — and all the apps that are exclusive to it — for a computer and all the hassles that come with it?
() Pac-Man 2600, considered by many to be the worst arcade conversion ever, sold 7 million units to unsuspecting customers who expected a faithful translation of the arcade game.
() E.T. was so hyped and so bad that several million copies were buried in the deserts of New Mexico.
() Custer's Revenge required the player to rape a native American woman.
Nintendo's Seal of Quality was in large part what revived the video games business, especially in the US. Parents who knew nothing about games could be assured that whatever they chose for their kids would be suitable and at least reasonably fun. Sony's ascendence could be just as readily explained by their use of CD-ROM media, the quality and innovation of their first-party titles and the phenomenal marketing effort that made PlayStation one of the coolest brands of the decade.
Personally, I think the success of the PlayStation is encapsulated in the masterful WipEout, the launch title that defined the console. Developed by the brilliant Psygnosis, the graphic design was handled from the start by The Designer's Republic, best known for their ultra-cool record covers for the Warp label. The music featured a careful selection of underground dance tracks. The game was so relentlessly cool that many European nightclubs begged Sony for demo systems for their chill-out rooms. In one fell stroke Sony divorced themselves from the child-friendly image of video games and in tandem with their brilliant advertising and promotion made video games seem almost dangerous and subversive. Genius.
However, I'd like to add that Nintendo's desire to control their licensing was one of the prime reasons that Nintendo never produced a CD-ROM based product. That left a gaping market void that Sony filled spectacularly.
This is a little bit of speculation, but I think if the N64 had a CD-ROM instead of carts, they would have kept Square and Capcom, and PSX would have been another Saturn.
If that happened now, I would get on the internet and find out quickly. In fact, I would have looked at reviews of the game and never bought it in the first place.
So this kind of quality control is not nearly as beneficial now as it was in Nintendo's heyday.
Nonetheless, the analogy seems to be relatively adequate here.
The cheap 'boobs/babes/bikini' apps constantly filled many slots in the top app lists, yet most seemed to be simply a collection of images and as such, their ratings were very, very low. They seemed to have no real content that wasn't freely available on the web.
Looking at the ones that were high in the top free app lists, they were simply 6-8 images of women in bikinis with ads attached.
Neither of us know for sure why Apple did what they did.
"I think what Apple was getting squeamish about wasn’t the sexy apps themselves, but the cheesiness that the sexy apps (and their prominence in best selling lists) was bestowing upon the general feel and vibe of the App Store. One thing I wasn’t aware of before the recent crackdown was the degree to which these apps were seeping into various non-entertainment categories. E.g., like half the “new” apps in the “productivity” category featured imagery of large-breasted bikini-clad women."
Actually... I know I will probably never understand this.
There is a large population that believes it is healthy to practice some restraint on the expression of human sexuality. They may not have a rational argument for believing so, but witnessing the dissolution of the family in the western world I wonder if traditional mores may be wiser than some of us think.
Some people with children desire to encourage them to have some reservation in their expression of sexuality, to resist the uninhibited style of our age. They hope to at least raise children that refrain from surfing porn with a handheld computer on a commuter train, fer chrissakes. And if Apple is willing to cater to their sensibilities, they will continue to earn their customers' money. It boils down to consumer preference and giving users what they want.
No, this is not what not allowing an app to be sold is. This is Apple's preference and not allowing users to get what they want.
Also, what's intrinsicialy wrong with someone looking at porn on the train? What makes it more wrong than, say, reading the Bible?
You're missing the point in the most spectacular possible way.
Boobs beat bombs.
By that I mean that very, very, very rarely does a kid watch Terminator and go out and become some killing machine at the mall. But all the time kids watch porno and go out and get the neighbor's kid pregnant (or get pregnant themselves). So parents have a highly irrational fear of doing anything to increase the already high sex drive that kids have. Especially in ages without birth control, controlling procreation until there was a good chance at child survival was a critical part of maintaining the species. Even with birth control, STDs travel through younger populations at a much, much higher rate than older ones, usually due to passions overcoming practicality.
Boobs beat bombs.
But it's only Americans that feel this way.
And anyway, if "protecting the kids" is the problem, then Apple should just not let kids buy the swimsuit app or whatever. Why should adults suffer because "STDs travel through younger populations at a much, much higher rate than older ones"? That's borderline insane.
(At least then, the parallel is on-target.)
I suppose the Nicomachean Ethics might get a bit more love, though it's a lot more self-centred than you might expect from the title. (Aristotle's basic question is "how should one live so as to attain eudaimonia?", and that last term means something much more like "happiness" or "well-being" than, say, "virtue".)
Which isn't to say that those works aren't historically important, or interesting, or produced by first-rate thinkers. But it does kinda suggest that if what you're after is truth, opinion and rank speculation aren't very reliable ways to get that even when done by geniuses.
(Yes, "kinda suggest" rather than "prove" or anything similarly strong; it is of course possible that we're all wrong nowadays and that, say, Descartes was right. But it's not looking likely.)
Sorry, getting so bored with repetitive nature of all discussion around app store. Apple is walled garden, will do what they want, allowed to do what they want.
Look at the numbers for the iPod Touch, almost two thirds of all iPod Touch owners are below 17. Given how many iPod Touches are out there, how many parents know about Parental Controls and how parents give little Johnny an iPod and never touch it after that and call Fox News when they find out about these "sexy apps"?
At least in with this branding idea, the parents might blame the app maker (SI, Playboy) instead of Apple because of the name recognition.
(That said, I'm all for removing this crap off the Top 25 lists.)