A way to help the 3DS!?

[Akaimizu]

I'm not sure if I want that as just look how the PC/Western causal market "Improved" console gaming.

That's an easy thing to answer. Popular titles of both *expensive 3D or CG-laden graphic games that spend lots of budget showing off graphics* and lower budget titles which concentrate on gameplay both for old-school and new-school methods. Before that, consoles were going for the big graphics race. Remember when Sony didn't even want 2D on their systems because their seal of quality meant bigger 3D or CG 3D graphics. Pressure from other consoles, which successfully embraced the 2D realm and games with lesser than million dollar budgets, forced their hand. That pressure came from the West, mind you. Including the XBLA arcade. Now everybody is trying to do that, some slower than others.

I think the biggest way some gamers got fooled, was blindly thinking that running a company like a cold hard business structure, driving game development costs way up, was a Western thing. It's something on a per-company basis. Sony brought the Big business model (which changed the game and put a hurt on Nintendo and Sega) to gaming long before Microsoft entered the picture to give them competition. Never forget that it was a Western corporation that first said, "Wait a minute. This is getting ridiculous. We need to be able to market games of all levels of monetary cost instead of this constant race to pumping more money into every game that sells."

[StriderTuna]

If iPhone-style stuff hit the consoles, it'd definitely be a problem as the causals would eat up the cheaply made games, thus damaging the bottom lines of companies that put in more effort on games.

[Akaimizu]

You do realize that it was already done on XBL before it was done on iPhone. It hasn't hurt the bottom line for them. It's called the Independant sector of the Marketplace. They also haven't been hiding it either. Enter Marketplace and you see it right there.

And yes, they also sell plenty of games for about a dollar. And games for 5 dollars, 10 dollars, and 15 dollars. For all intensive purposes, XBLA was the App Store before the App Store.

Why did it not mess them up? Different audience demands for portables than consoles. Portables are made for "on the go" and casuals on the go love more condensed thrills. One reason why a pause and save-anywhere feature (for longer games) has way more demand on a portable. However, people are willing to pay for big budget things for things on a console they must sit down at the TV for. Even casuals want something more impressive, long playing, and glittery more of the time. They have the options to go cheap, anytime. They buy it too, but it certainly doesn't slow them down from buying the next $60 A-AAA title in droves.

[Kent]

Why did it not mess them up? Different audience demands for portables than consoles.

XBLA is also tightly controlled by Microsoft, whether or not titles can get released on it. It's a practice that has both positives and negatives - generally-speaking, they pretty much only block the crappy rehashes and cheap imitations from going up - one of the primary guidelines for getting a game accepted onto the service is doing something different, and actually putting effort into the game itself.

It's gone a long ways toward keeping XBLA relatively-free of shovelware and Gameloft-style rip-offs.

Of course, there's the Xbox Live Indie Games channel, which only requires peer review. A similar dichotomy of services can be seen in the Windows Phone Marketplace - where Xbox Live titles need to pass Xbox Live certification and Microsoft approval, but everything else (including non-Xbox Live games) just needs a peer review to pass muster. To anyone who's looked at the relatively-unmoderated Indie Games/Marketplace sections, it's pretty clear how much higher the bar is for Xbox Live titles.

But, you know, I think it's probably the best way to go. It provides an officially-endorsed selection of software that's generally somewhat solid in quality (at the very least, from a technical perspective - buggy XBLA games are pretty rare, and people underestimate the amount of testing Microsoft Studios does on them in-house before they go on sale), while still providing the wilds, where games only need to be given the OK by other independant developers. It may create a divide in software sections, but it's probably the lesser of two evils (though indie games do need better marketplace exposure)

[DayDreamer]

not sure if anyone posted anything about this yet but
http://ds.ign.com/articles/119/1192683p1.html

There is going to be a port of monster hunter tri for the 3ds
so this might help it a bit

[Weeaboolits]

I think the announcement of a Monster Hunter title has pretty much guaranteed the 3DS a sizable market share in Japan.