Is a Nintendo made easy Pokemon game maker feasible profitable and a good idea?

[Peppermint Phoenix]

Imagine PC disc that could let you make your own main series pokemon adventures and put them up online and to be downloaded on to special DS cartridges which can be cleared to play different adventures. I think it would be a LOT of fun but I'm not sure if it's feasible. Now these fan made games would still follow the "rules". No Fakemon all pokemon would have the same move restrictions ect. Would it be possible for Nintendo to make it easy enough to make it profitable. I don't know. I'm not to worried about balance since they can program the game so you can't have Rayquaza's everywhere and you have to earn via preprogramed battle facility the ability to train your high level pokes to your main series game. But can they make transferring all that data on their servers profitable. Maybe if they have a subscription for the game maker but not the game player? Or have daily time limits like on dream world? Is there a third party Nintendo could hire who knows how to make a game maker easy enough for kids. Will it be possible in the future if so how long? What about censorship would friend codes do the trick or would that ruin profits? Would it be fun enough for it to be worth Nintendo's time?

Any thoughts?

 

[black57mage]

I like your idea. However, I don't think it's anything Nintendo would ever consider. If kids can get online and download a new region and story anytime they want, it would severely detract the demand for next-gen Pokemon games. Unless, of course, they do input a subscription system, like you said. Make it $5-10 a month or whatever, although I do think your game player would have to be the one that's subscription based. If people can play it for free and the much smaller development community are the ones who have to pay, Nintendo will end up getting very few subscription fees, and as a result there will be plenty of scenarios online for everybody else to play until the world ends.

If this were to happen, I wouldn't be worried at all about the scenario development. Look at Starcraft and Starcraft 2. The dev community for those games (especially the latter) are able to do insane things. You can turn SC2 into a first person shooter, a turn based strategy game, whatever you like, using the scenario editor they provide you. Now, I don't think there will be many 10-year-olds making scenarios for this, but there'll be plenty of people my age (yeah I play Pokemon at 20) who would be all over making new scenarios. That would provide plenty of them for the younger generation to play. I don't make anything on SC2 because I'm just not good at that, but there are plenty of people who are and I enjoy playing their creations.

For this to work however, like you said, there would have to be some strict regulations. The biggest one I'd say would have to be no cross-scenario trading. If somebody makes one that gives you a Mewtwo 2 hours into the game, the guy who makes a legitimate Nintendo-like scenario isn't going to appreciate it being ruined because some guy made it easy to bypass his challenge. I also think, like you said, they should have regulations against that, so you "can't have Rayquaza's everywhere."

I think this would be much like a Pokemon MMO, which I just commented on on a different thread, and which I have thought about quite a lot. There would be several big issues they would have to address, and I think something like this would be very possible. But again, considering how stupid Nintendo is sometimes, I don't have much faith in them to make something like this, much less get it right.

 

[Xenidal]

I'm not liking it as you described it.

Here's how I think it should be done (if they were to do it, which they would never do):
First, Nintendo gives fans the software and permission to make fan games.
Second, the fans make the game and then give the game back to Nintendo.
Third, Nintendo looks over the submitted games and if they are of a high enough quality, Nintendo then sells them for a low price (about $1 or so each) on the DS / Wii stores. Nintendo then keeps all the profits (so this way will pay off, assuming people actually choose to make the games. Which they probably will... there are tons of people who make unauthorized fan games and illegal ROM hacks with no intention of profiting from them)

And I don't think that there should be any out-right restrictions. Rules can sometimes be broken... if you can pull off something bizarre and make it still work and feel right, then I don't see why the software should prevent it. If you want level 100 Rayquazas and infinite Master Balls in the first town, go ahead. If you want to change the movesets, go ahead. But Nintendo can choose not to distribute any nonsense.
As for Fakemon, I also disagree. What if I wanted to make a game and include the Original Dragon? Or Venustoise? Well, these aren't "Fakemon", but they aren't official Pokémon either. Again, if you can pull it off, I don't see why you shouldn't. But in most cases Fakemon probably won't meet Nintendo's standards anyway.
All this being said, trading and battling should only be possible between people playing the same game. That way anything unusual that Nintendo chooses to release (Fakemon, altered movesets, and availability of rare / powerful Pokémon, etc.) will not affect the playability of any official Pokémon game or any other fan game.

Another thing -- the software has got to give you enough control to actually make something decent with it. Most softwares that are designed to be "easy to use" have the problem of being severely limiting if you try to do anything remotely outside the paradigm.

 

[Lord Clowncrete]

In-short, make Pokemon an open-source game? Lol, as an amateur programmer I would love that. Messing with the codes, making psychic types super-effective on dark and steel, and so many more things. The idea is juicy!!

There would be problems about licensing. I can release a game without paying them anything and eat away at their precious profits. That being said they can always release codes for older games like r/b/y or g/s/c which don't sell much anymore and get money for releasing the codes as the OP(?) said. They would actually earn profit since r/b/y isn't going to generate cash by cartridge sales, anyway.

 

[Peppermint Phoenix]

I'm not liking it as you described it.

Here's how I think it should be done (if they were to do it, which they would never do):
First, Nintendo gives fans the software and permission to make fan games.
Second, the fans make the game and then give the game back to Nintendo.
Third, Nintendo looks over the submitted games and if they are of a high enough quality, Nintendo then sells them for a low price (about $1 or so each) on the DS / Wii stores. Nintendo then keeps all the profits (so this way will pay off, assuming people actually choose to make the games. Which they probably will... there are tons of people who make unauthorized fan games and illegal ROM hacks with no intention of profiting from them)

And I don't think that there should be any out-right restrictions. Rules can sometimes be broken... if you can pull off something bizarre and make it still work and feel right, then I don't see why the software should prevent it. If you want level 100 Rayquazas and infinite Master Balls in the first town, go ahead. If you want to change the movesets, go ahead. But Nintendo can choose not to distribute any nonsense.
As for Fakemon, I also disagree. What if I wanted to make a game and include the Original Dragon? Or Venustoise? Well, these aren't "Fakemon", but they aren't official Pokémon either. Again, if you can pull it off, I don't see why you shouldn't. But in most cases Fakemon probably won't meet Nintendo's standards anyway.
All this being said, trading and battling should only be possible between people playing the same game. That way anything unusual that Nintendo chooses to release (Fakemon, altered movesets, and availability of rare / powerful Pokémon, etc.) will not affect the playability of any official Pokémon game or any other fan game.

Another thing -- the software has got to give you enough control to actually make something decent with it. Most softwares that are designed to be "easy to use" have the problem of being severely limiting if you try to do anything remotely outside the paradigm.

Uuum connectivity to main series games dude. Connectivity to the main games. Beat an adventure and you don't get to do anything else with your Pokemon sounds like a blast. Also Nintendo choosing the games would mean you would have to cater to Nintendo and main stream audience rather than just your family friends and random people on the internet giving you a lot less artistic freedom. Odds of getting your game released would be so freaking slim that many people would be discouraged. Also charging money for each individual game would give games with longer campaigns more value thus game ideas that would work better for short games would be ruined and it would turn into a giant competition into who has the most free time to make the longest story. I don't think this software should force people into a competition to just so you can have your friends play your game.

I think it can make up for lack of complete control with the inclusion of many options. For example a little box a the start of the game asking you what time system you want (real time, 1/60 time, static time, or event based time) would be a lot more fun then having to program the time system yourself. Also kids don't know how program not every adult can program. I can barely program.

 

[Xenidal]

Uuum connectivity to main series games dude. Connectivity to the main games. Beat an adventure and you don't get to do anything else with your Pokemon sounds like a blast. Also Nintendo choosing the games would mean you would have to cater to Nintendo and main stream audience rather than just your family friends and random people on the internet giving you a lot less artistic freedom. Odds of getting your game released would be so freaking slim that many people would be discouraged. Also charging money for each individual game would give games with longer campaigns more value thus game ideas that would work better for short games would be ruined and it would turn into a giant competition into who has the most free time to make the longest story. I don't think this software should force people into a competition to just so you can have your friends play your game.

I think it can make up for lack of complete control with the inclusion of many options. For example a little box a the start of the game asking you what time system you want (real time, 1/60 time, static time, or event based time) would be a lot more fun then having to program the time system yourself. Also kids don't know how program not every adult can program. I can barely program.

The fan game would have connectivity to itself or another version of that fan game. Even in the official games, there is little or no connectivity to games outside of the Generation you are playing on (other than transferring the older Pokémon to a newer game). There's no reason that every single fan game must be compatible with each other and with the official games, especially if there is a difference in the movesets which would create an incompatibility (unless you do as you said and not let anyone alter the movesets, but that would really be limiting your freedom in making it. Even Game Freak has altered the movesets throughout the course of the official games).

Second, if Nintendo were to implement some sort of idea like this, there is a 0% chance that they will allow people to freely upload the games without a screening process. This is Nintendo we're talking about. They won't take the chance of allowing someone to upload a game that could be filled with profanity, drug references, porn, copyright infringement, etc. Plus, Nintendo already has a strict set of quality standards for any indie developer looking to develop on Nintendo systems with Nintendo's approval. There's no way that Nintendo is going to trash their entire policy overnight just for the sake of a ton of crappy games ending up in their shop (games which would never have met the quality requirement in the first place). And either way, your artistic freedom will be limited. There's no way around it. Either Nintendo limits what you can distribute with the screening process or the program itself limit what you can make by simply not allowing you to add certain features. In my opinion, the latter would be even more frustrating, not to mention the side effect of the eShop (or whatever online store this system would use) being so cluttered with bad games that the good ones may get lost in all the crap.

That does bring up a point... you could always make games with their software and distribute them through a third party without going through Nintendo's screening process. That would probably violate the user agreement of the software, but people would still do it anyway. Then again, people already distribute unauthorized games so it's not a new problem... but if Nintendo provided people with the software to make it a lot easier then surely this will be an even bigger problem.

As for charging money for the games... I don't think it's all that unreasonable. If Nintendo screens for qualiy then every game on there would theoretically be a full-length / high-quality game, not unlike the official games. And $1 for an official game is insanely cheap... I don't think that this will really deter players. The only thing that it would change is that players should only download games that they are serious about playing... not download every single game that they come across.

It would be great if they could sell the games for free, but I'm thinking that there's really no way of making this profitable for them. There's just way too many costs involved and no real way to make it back other than either by charging for the games, charging to make the games (which makes even less sense because you'd be paying to do work for Nintendo with nothing in return, unless Nintendo were to charge for the games and then give the developers a share of the profits, but then it's no longer a free game), or possibly including a ton of ads where you go to download the games (this may actually work... I don't know).

As for your last point, I agree, but I still think that there should be an option to further customize it by writing your own code (or by some other means).



Edit - didn't realize that this would be so long...