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Game Compilations

Twinbee

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Asura

Asura

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Don't forget that you are saving on packaging and parts of 4 cards.

Yeah, but Nintendo probably churn the standard capacity cards out by the million, rather than a 4x size card, which would be a limited run specifically for Phoenix Wright.

Anyway, probably not worth more discussion as we have no idea how much DS cards are to manufacture, never mind the price of a theoretical 4x size card! <_<

The games industry should really follow the DVD and music industry. Where are the double and triple packs of games? When gears of war 2 came out why didn't they release a gears of war 1 and 2 double pack at the same time?

Not really criticising your argument, but more your specific example - pretty sure they actually DID release a Gears of War double-pack.

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gone fishin

gone fishin

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The games industry should really follow the DVD and music industry. Where are the double and triple packs of games? When gears of war 2 came out why didn't they release a gears of war 1 and 2 double pack at the same time? The industry moans that second hand games are taking all their money, yet when the sequels come out the only way to buy the originals is second hand. It'd probably cost a couple of quid to put an extra dvd and manual in the box, no reason that can't add an extra £10 to £15 though to a double or tripple box set.

This is a great point, more and more the DVD market is going down the compilation route and as you pointed out, it's a great way to get at the 2nd hand market. With this generation of hardware probably going to last another 3 or so years, there's no excuse for re-releasing (in compilation form) some of those early launch titles.

I said it in my previous post, but I'm amazed that nobody has exploited the Wii's backwards compatibility more. Why isn't there a compilation of Burnout 1 and 2? What about the Lord of the Rings games? Nintendo's sporty titles (1080, Wave Race etc). Mario sports titles etc etc. These really are games that are bringing in no revenue at all.

And doing a special double pack when a sequel is released is a fantastic idea- say No More Heroes 2- why not release it with NMH and the GC version of Killer 7 as a bonus? Make it £10 more expensive and I'm sure it would still sell like hotcakes to the punters who haven't tried them.

Anyway, it's quite interesting to do a random search on the worldofspectrum and find the amount of games that were released on a compilation at some point. It seems that almost all decent games eventually went down this route. Again, it was a long time for one generation, something that will be similar with the current gen, so maybe we will see some compilations.....

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George Clooney

George Clooney

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Anyway, it's quite interesting to do a random search on the worldofspectrum and find the amount of games that were released on a compilation at some point. It seems that almost all decent games eventually went down this route. Again, it was a long time for one generation, something that will be similar with the current gen, so maybe we will see some compilations.....

As already mentioned, Ocean released virtually all of their big games onto compilations at some point, or at least thats how it seemed. They were incredibly common at the time. I never thought about it hurting the sales of full price games to be honest. There were a few games that I really wanted that I did buy full price, but generally waited till budget/compilations for everything. Mainly because I was young and saving 2-4 quid for a budget title took me a week.

I suppose one thing that didnt help was the move from casette/disk to cartridges as consoles became more popular at the time. That, and memory size being a big factor in the cost of some games, I'm sure some games cost more purely because they needed more memory on carts. And while you could quite easily get away with boxing 4 tapes together without losing a lot of space, more than 1 cart took up a fair bit. From there what became a staple of the computer market just kinda got lost slightly, although I do remember seeing it on the PC but to a much lesser extent. It would usually be games from the same series bundled, rather than the often completely different games you got on speccy/c64 compliations.

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Unofficial Who

Unofficial Who

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But optical media is a lot cheaper than tapes or floppies and there's far less returns due to poor duplication.

I have seen some companies start to give away the previous game in a series now.

Steam has a deal where if you buy Bioshock 2 you get Bioshock for free. And if you already own the first game you can give that extra licence to a friend. Neat way of spreading the popularity of the brand.

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Twinbee

Twinbee

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Actually quite a few 2-4 game type compilations for the PS2 have been released in the US market in the last few years, Capcom/Konami/Activision have done compilations of some of their game series at budget prices.

Well then why not over here? <grabs someone's lapels> Eh EH?

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Broker

Broker

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Well, theres the size of the media problem. If a game fills a DVD how are you going to get more than one game on there? Having more discs in the case means it's more expensive to make so not really budget.

Surely not all games fill the whole disc?

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gone fishin

gone fishin

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Actually quite a few 2-4 game type compilations for the PS2 have been released in the US market in the last few years, Capcom/Konami/Activision have done compilations of some of their game series at budget prices.

I was actually going to post a question to the forum- are compilations more of a European thing? I don't know if there were many compilations in the 8-bit days, but I was thinking- maybe compilations are bigger in Europe which would explain why we don't really see any. I know there's been a few GB/GBA/DS compilations (as Cart sizes became bigger, and cheaper), but I've rarely seen them for home consoles.

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robotattack

robotattack

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Lol- are you not thinking of the Beau Jolly compilation Big Box? It was 30 Activision games... in a big box!

"30 Amazing Games In One Big Box"

Some good games on that- Barry McGuigan, Knightmare, Park Patrol...

I had the Big Box on my Amstrad CPC! I think it cost something like £17.99 which I funded the sum of with several months worth of pocket money and some Christmas money. For some reason Wonderboy and Supersprint had a problem where the image kept rolling vertically so I had to send those tapes back and they ended up sending me a 20 game pack which also ended up having a load of favourites on it. I eventually discovered that the "rolling" problem could be sorted by turning a knob on the back of the monitor that adjusted the vertical hold, but as I ended up getting a load of other games for the sacrifice of two I wasn't too bothered. :)

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robotattack

robotattack

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The Metal Gear Solid Collection was $30 too.

edit: there was a Prince of Persia pack released for the PS2 as well, as I recall.

Yeah there was. I got it as it was cheaper than buying The Two Thrones on its own at the time, despite already owning the other two. (I actually meant to get rid of those but never got around to it. :))

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Grey Fox

Grey Fox

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I suspect part of it is that as games have generally become longer experiences (as opposed to the more arcadey games of generations past) then every old games compilation you sell potentially eats into sales of "your new big title" and the opportunity to sell DLC etc for your latest blockbuster.

Shame as I've always liked the idea of compilation packs - e.g a Classic Mario Kart Compilation for Wii so people who keep getting told in reviews that the newest one "isn't as good as the SNES original" can find out for themselves :-)

Then again I suspect the other thing is that all of the current manufacturer's currently offer download services and if they can sell it digitally and bypass the retail chain then that might be the route they take.

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gone fishin

gone fishin

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Why Capcom never released these compliations in Europe is something I'd like to know:

Mmacbox.jpg

Mega_Man_X_Collection_Coverart.png

Maybe translation issues? Were the original MM games released in other European countries? Or the X series?

But it is annoying that they weren't released. Same goes for Midway Arcade Treasures vol 2 and 3 (for the Gamecube)

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Unofficial Who

Unofficial Who

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Has anyone else got the Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition for Gamecube? For some reason, that was bundled with the Gamecube but not released separately (not officially anyway).

I've only ever seen it for about $200AU.

I did manage to get Wind Waker with the extra disc with OOT on it but I was very lucky. At the time of release a lot of shops (especially a major chain which I won't mention here) sold out of those on day one.

Oddly enough you could still buy Wind Waker with the sticker advertising the free disc that they'd run out of.

Oddly enough as well they also had very clean second hand copies of the OOT disc for about $50AU...

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Dudley

Dudley

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Has anyone else got the Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition for Gamecube? For some reason, that was bundled with the Gamecube but not released separately (not officially anyway).

Yep, was working for a popular gaming retailer and they sent us 4 to bundle with Gamecubes.

We didn't sell Gamecubes.

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Broker

Broker

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One thing I just can't fathom is how so many publishers/developers just sit on these massive shitpiles of games from previous generations and don't seem to want to sell them. I know that Nintendo sell their old games through the VC, and that a lot of these games wouldn't sell well enough to justify a disc release. What I can't fathom is how so few people are doing things like the god of war collection. It wouldn't be at all difficult from a coding perspective to run PS2/Xbox/GC games at a slightly higher resolution and just flog them again on disc. When MGS4 came out, why wasn't there a Blu-Ray released at the same time with MGS 1, 2, 3 and Twin Snakes on it at the highest resolution the original code could support?

When DVD's became more popular every studio in the world struggled to get all their old crap out on DVD. Sure, some old games look crap, but it's not like Hellraiser looks good nowadays, yet that didn't stop it getting a DVD release. The movie studios churned out movies on DVD in a market which is far more saturated than the games one, and when digital distro raised it's head they started selling their movies there as well. Most movies can be found on video, DVD, download and some come on laserdisc or UMD or whatever. That doesn't even factor in the numerous re-releases and different editions on each format. Conversely, If I fancy playinf Shenmue or something, I have to find an original copy of the game from when it was originally released and buy the machine because the current hardware under my TV isn't compatible with the disc.

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mushashi

mushashi

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Isn't it just a simple matter of economics?, porting a film is relatively simple, take your master and encode to what ever output format you want, porting a game to run on a completely different hardware/controller architecture is a lot more work, unless you have near flawless emulation of the original system available to make the process easy.

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ScouserInExile

ScouserInExile

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One thing I just can't fathom is how so many publishers/developers just sit on these massive shitpiles of games from previous generations and don't seem to want to sell them. I know that Nintendo sell their old games through the VC, and that a lot of these games wouldn't sell well enough to justify a disc release. What I can't fathom is how so few people are doing things like the god of war collection. It wouldn't be at all difficult from a coding perspective to run PS2/Xbox/GC games at a slightly higher resolution and just flog them again on disc. When MGS4 came out, why wasn't there a Blu-Ray released at the same time with MGS 1, 2, 3 and Twin Snakes on it at the highest resolution the original code could support?

It must not be economically viable to release older games, even on their original format, otherwise games companies would do it. While we might say "wouldn't it be great if they released the rest of x series on modern hardware", i imagine the vast majority of the game-buying public would just turn their noses up at it.

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Gabe

Gabe

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One thing I just can't fathom is how so many publishers/developers just sit on these massive shitpiles of games from previous generations and don't seem to want to sell them. I know that Nintendo sell their old games through the VC, and that a lot of these games wouldn't sell well enough to justify a disc release. What I can't fathom is how so few people are doing things like the god of war collection. It wouldn't be at all difficult from a coding perspective to run PS2/Xbox/GC games at a slightly higher resolution and just flog them again on disc. When MGS4 came out, why wasn't there a Blu-Ray released at the same time with MGS 1, 2, 3 and Twin Snakes on it at the highest resolution the original code could support?

When DVD's became more popular every studio in the world struggled to get all their old crap out on DVD. Sure, some old games look crap, but it's not like Hellraiser looks good nowadays, yet that didn't stop it getting a DVD release. The movie studios churned out movies on DVD in a market which is far more saturated than the games one, and when digital distro raised it's head they started selling their movies there as well. Most movies can be found on video, DVD, download and some come on laserdisc or UMD or whatever. That doesn't even factor in the numerous re-releases and different editions on each format. Conversely, If I fancy playinf Shenmue or something, I have to find an original copy of the game from when it was originally released and buy the machine because the current hardware under my TV isn't compatible with the disc.

Well for starters you are targetting a much, much smaller market. Then there is the higher price-point, the fact that most gamers have probably never even heard of most games released in the last couple of years (let alone the last 5/10/20) and - as has been mentioned - the emulation would need to be perfect. Then there are controller differences, marketing, duplication (if it is a retail release) - it is a lot of effort for something most people wouldn't care about.

And yes, people do buy a lot of shit - but they probably buy the same shit each year when it updates, rather than broadening their horizons.

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ScouserInExile

ScouserInExile

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Really? People buy some fucking terrible shit, and it's been proven time and again that even more people buy terrible shit if it's got a reconisable name on it.

Yeah, but they buy the NEW terrible shit. You only have to look at the amount of FIFAXX there are in the used section of Game when FIFAXX+1 comes out.

If they could get money from flogging old rope, they would, everyone loves great reward for little effort :P

Funnily enough, one of the publishers I used to work for started out by copying shareware, sticking the disks in boxes and flogging it. The guy who ran the place worked out that people wouldn't take stuff for free, because it was free but would pay for it if you put it in a box and stuck a price tag on it. The guy made litterally millions from doing this.

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