Muumuu president Yukihito Morikawa has seemingly let slip Nintendoâs projected pricing of its DS software in a recent entry on the developerâs company website.
Morikawa-san claims that Nintendo will offer the games at Japanese retail for 3,800 yen - under £19 â a price he feels will be too high given the kind of software he hints is at the forefront of most developersâ minds.
"I heard from a producer that a few DS projects going on in his company are deadlocked," says Morikawa in his diary. "There are a lot of new things that can be done [with the touch-sensitive screen] such as making hand drawn characters fight with each other or transforming a 3D object with the use of the stylus. You can bang with the stylus, dig holes, chip away things...it's easy to come up with those kinds of small ideas, and the DS is a superb hardware in that sense." He continues, "But, those kinds of ideas are too small to fit in a 3,800 yen cartridge, which is why developers are deadlocked. It's difficult to expand on those types of small ideas, in the same way a short story will not become a good novel if you bloat it up with unnecessary ideas."
Interestingly, Morikawa-san does not mention the argument that such a small retail price may squeeze developersâ financial restraints, resulting in studios working on software for a portable market that not too long ago would have merited a full home console time-frame and roster.
