Make Zelda Free

Zelda for FreeA recent article from Kotaku brings up a lot of great issues about casual gamers and the value of games based of the amount of enjoyment one gets from them. The following argument was sparked by the invent of the Ambassador program for 3DS owners allowing them get the original Zelda for free and the basic premise is this: without the invention of Wii’s virtual console and the 3DS eshop, a gamer would get less enjoyment out of one $40 3DS game than forty $1 games for a mobile device such as the iPhone or Android equipped smart phones. He goes on to make this argument:

Nintendo doesn’t need to make all of its old games free, but imagine its improved fortunes against the devices that sell $1 games if The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. and a handful of Nintendo oldies of incomparable qualities were free on new Nintendo hardware. Would Nintendo lose money it could have made selling the original Zelda for the nth time to the same customer? Sure. Would Nintendo risk giving so many games away for free that 3DS owners wouldn’t feel the need to buy new, more expensive games from Nintendo and other 3DS game-makers? Maybe, but only if people only buy 3DSes to play old games, which I doubt they do.

While I don’t believe Nintendo needs to make games free, this author talks a lot of sense. The pricing of games on the 3DS makes it directly comparable to the awful touch interface games of today’s smart phones. When you consider the investment you put into a smart phone compared to the one time price of the 3DS and the portability of the 3DS, the deal becomes even sweeter. Add to that the ability to watch video content via Netflix, and surely other mediums to come, the 3DS beat mobile phones on every level of entertainment.

The author’s argument that the loss of sales to potentially free games would be well worth the additional revenue in system sales. So do the games need to be free? I don’t think so, what Nintendo needs to do is stop advertising the 3D visuals (we get it already) and start telling us about all the $5 games we can get. The Legend of Zelda? Yes please. Mario Land? Of course. The prices of the eshop games make the 3DS competitive to cheap mobile phone games and never again will one of those cursed games appear on my iPod.

So do you think Nintendo needs to make their classic titles free? Do you prefer your phone games to eshop games? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Source: Kotaku

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