The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Aside from having a really long name (I had to remove the spaces so it would fit in the subject line), this PSN-downloadable PSP game is a lot of fun. It's basically what you get if you take Rogue/Nethack, Dungeon Keeper, Dwarf Fortress, Desktop Tower Defense, and SimEarth and squish them together while throwing in a healthy dose of humorous references to other games, particularly JRPGs.

In short, it is a brilliantly confusing mess.

I had emailed NIS America about releasing it on UMD... but they have no plans... so I have no plans on buying it... unfortunately... maybe for $10.

Digital downloads are really the way everything is going. Personally I prefer just having all my games on a memory stick than having to carry around a bunch of UMDs, and also downloaded games take less battery since they don't have to spin the disc up. It's also a lot cheaper to deal with.

From this point forward Sony requires that all PSP games be downloadable (for the PSP Go) but doesn't require that they be on UMD. The PS3 has similarly gotten a lot more attention on the download side than the Blu-Ray side - lower costs and expectations means studios can spend more time making games that are genuinely FUN.

The obvious downside is that you can't lend games to friends and there's a limit to how many times you can change systems, since you can only activate a game for so many different devices. So there goes the used game market, but the publishers and game creators have no incentive to keep that going since they don't get any residuals from that anyway. A big part of the initial game price is to factor in the amount they wouldn't get via resales, and for that reason I suspect that downloadable games will get much cheaper in the future.

For now it's a bit silly that Badman is $20, but I enjoyed the demo and didn't want to wait for the inevitable $10 price cut (which I'm sure will happen soon enough).

fluffy wrote:A big part of the initial game price is to factor in the amount they wouldn't get via resales, and for that reason I suspect that downloadable games will get much cheaper in the future.

you think so? in my experience prices don't go down, since they realize they can get away with the high prices anyway.
-bill

I'm thinking long term people will be sick of paying disc prices for download content and prices will drop. I don't know why I believe the free market will prevail here when I am so anti-capitalist in general.

Looks like NIS actually took my email to heart... (and the many other emails they must have received...) and are looking to release this on UMD! Pre-Order Here. They need 1000 pre-orders by 11/13 to make it worth their time/money. So tell your Mom & Dad, Grampa & Grandma to put down their hard earned $20 and snap this up quick! I pre-ordered mine this weekend as soon as I got the email from NIS America.

Well, bad news was that NIS didn't get enough pre-orders... and they canceled the UMD... but the good news is that if you want Badman 2 on UMD, it also comes with Badman 1!