Earth Grounded - Why EarthBound Will Never Come to VC
Many of you will have read and been outraged by the article over on EarthBound Central (and elsewhere) about the specific legal reasons for EarthBound's lack of availability on Virtual Console. This article isn't about that - in fact, it's not really about the game's content at all - but rather a look at the history and culture surrounding what is undoubtedly one strange little piece of software.
The largest and most obvious reason is that there simply isn't a great market for it. According to research firm Forecasting and Analyzing Digital Entertainment (FADE), in 2010 the top 50 Virtual Console games accounted for 80% of the service's revenue, with the majority of games seeing sales under 10,000. The top downloadable game for Nintendo systems that year in the US and PAL regions (Japan and Korea were excluded from the data) was Super Mario Bros. 3, with 1,000,000 sales. Sales of all VC games were down 25% in total from 2009, and don't seem to have improved much since.
EarthBound, were it to be released for VC, simply couldn't sell that well. For one thing, a good deal of people either own or have played the game already, significantly weakening their position relative to 2008, when a lot of people could have come into the series fresh following Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While a US copy of EarthBound can fetch silly prices and an $8 VC release would be great for people who just can't steal their games, Japanese players pay around ¥1000 for a used copy (roughly $12) and many, I'd imagine, would rather have a physical copy of their games than a ROM you have to pay for.
This leads nicely on to my next point - other markets matter now. The SNES sold a relatively hefty 49 million systems, around 23.5 million of which were in North America (realistically, those were mostly to the USA and Canada). 17 million went to Japan, with the other regions accounting for around 8.5 million. Europe and Australia were considered insignificant enough that they weren't granted a release of Earthbound at all (and in a time where getting past region locking involved pliers, that was a big deal).
Now, the paradigm has shifted. Gamers no longer live exclusively in those two regions or speak exclusively English or Japanese. In fact, in the current generation, just over 50% of PS3 owners and, more importantly to this article, around 40% of Wii owners live in either Europe or "Rest of World" (mainly Brazil and Australia).
'Brilliant!', you probably think, 'a whole new untapped market for Earthbound!'. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but that's quite unlikely. the reasons for this are twofold - the market doesn't want to be tapped and very little of it would be able to be.
Gamers in Europe and the rest of the world, for the most part, have simply never heard of EarthBound outside of Super Smash Bros. There's a reason I can count on my hands the number of European, Australian and 'other' Starmen.netters I've seen around here, despite the large number of users. That reason is that without any sort of prior knowledge or ability to obtain the game, most people simply won't bother. Even adding the ability to purchase the game might not help in the long run, since it would have to coincide with a large advertising push that Nintendo just wouldn't give.
The second reason pertains to language. The bulk of the 'other' market does not speak English - in fact, only four nations (the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand - five if you count South Africa, but it's statistically insignificant in gaming) speak English to any meaningful degree and together can only give a population of around 90 million - around 3/4 the size of Japan. Far larger is the majority of Europe (a continent of 740 million) and South America (385 million) who don't speak English. A full translation to at the very least the major European languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German and Portuguese) would be necessary, at a major cost of development which might well outweigh the relative income that could be generated.
In summary, releasing Earthbound on Virtual Console, wonderful as it would be, just ain't gonna happen. It would be expensive, would only appeal to North American gamers and would ultimately be quite fruitless. But if it were released? I'd say it could sell into the low five digits - possibly 30,000 - before disappearing once more.
- MrNameless
Many of you will have read and been outraged by the article over on EarthBound Central (and elsewhere) about the specific legal reasons for EarthBound's lack of availability on Virtual Console. This article isn't about that - in fact, it's not really about the game's content at all - but rather a look at the history and culture surrounding what is undoubtedly one strange little piece of software.
The largest and most obvious reason is that there simply isn't a great market for it. According to research firm Forecasting and Analyzing Digital Entertainment (FADE), in 2010 the top 50 Virtual Console games accounted for 80% of the service's revenue, with the majority of games seeing sales under 10,000. The top downloadable game for Nintendo systems that year in the US and PAL regions (Japan and Korea were excluded from the data) was Super Mario Bros. 3, with 1,000,000 sales. Sales of all VC games were down 25% in total from 2009, and don't seem to have improved much since.
EarthBound, were it to be released for VC, simply couldn't sell that well. For one thing, a good deal of people either own or have played the game already, significantly weakening their position relative to 2008, when a lot of people could have come into the series fresh following Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While a US copy of EarthBound can fetch silly prices and an $8 VC release would be great for people who just can't steal their games, Japanese players pay around ¥1000 for a used copy (roughly $12) and many, I'd imagine, would rather have a physical copy of their games than a ROM you have to pay for.
This leads nicely on to my next point - other markets matter now. The SNES sold a relatively hefty 49 million systems, around 23.5 million of which were in North America (realistically, those were mostly to the USA and Canada). 17 million went to Japan, with the other regions accounting for around 8.5 million. Europe and Australia were considered insignificant enough that they weren't granted a release of Earthbound at all (and in a time where getting past region locking involved pliers, that was a big deal).
Now, the paradigm has shifted. Gamers no longer live exclusively in those two regions or speak exclusively English or Japanese. In fact, in the current generation, just over 50% of PS3 owners and, more importantly to this article, around 40% of Wii owners live in either Europe or "Rest of World" (mainly Brazil and Australia).
'Brilliant!', you probably think, 'a whole new untapped market for Earthbound!'. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but that's quite unlikely. the reasons for this are twofold - the market doesn't want to be tapped and very little of it would be able to be.
Gamers in Europe and the rest of the world, for the most part, have simply never heard of EarthBound outside of Super Smash Bros. There's a reason I can count on my hands the number of European, Australian and 'other' Starmen.netters I've seen around here, despite the large number of users. That reason is that without any sort of prior knowledge or ability to obtain the game, most people simply won't bother. Even adding the ability to purchase the game might not help in the long run, since it would have to coincide with a large advertising push that Nintendo just wouldn't give.
The second reason pertains to language. The bulk of the 'other' market does not speak English - in fact, only four nations (the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand - five if you count South Africa, but it's statistically insignificant in gaming) speak English to any meaningful degree and together can only give a population of around 90 million - around 3/4 the size of Japan. Far larger is the majority of Europe (a continent of 740 million) and South America (385 million) who don't speak English. A full translation to at the very least the major European languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German and Portuguese) would be necessary, at a major cost of development which might well outweigh the relative income that could be generated.
In summary, releasing Earthbound on Virtual Console, wonderful as it would be, just ain't gonna happen. It would be expensive, would only appeal to North American gamers and would ultimately be quite fruitless. But if it were released? I'd say it could sell into the low five digits - possibly 30,000 - before disappearing once more.
- MrNameless
