DS games to retail for 3,800 yen?

TOKYO--In a recent online diary entry on his company's Web site, Muumuu president Yukihito Morikawa hinted that the retail price of Nintendo DS cartridges will be 3,800 yen ($35) in Japan. Since Muumuu is a third-party developer, the announcement is not an official release by Nintendo, and it is not known whether the price will be for all DS cartridges.

In his diary, Morikawa makes some critical statements about the price, saying that 3,800 yen per cartridge for the DS will be too expensive for some games and that it will limit the developers' freedom. Morikawa says that the DS’ hardware allows small but unique game ideas to be realized into a product at a low development cost. However, Morikawa continues, the developers won't be able to market those small games, because they can’t sell them at a lower price.

"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 [in the game] 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.”

"But, those kinds of ideas are too small to fit in a 3,800 yen cartridge, which is why [the developers] are deadlocked,” continues Morikawa. “It's difficult to expand on those types of small ideas, kind of like how a short story won't become a good novel if you bloat it up with unnecessary ideas. So the only way to fill a 3,800 yen cartridge is by stuffing in one huge idea or a lot of small ideas. But we can’t stuff in a bunch of small ideas, because that’s something which is already going to be done with Made in Wario [WarioWare, Inc. DS]."

Muumuu has developed a number of games for Sony Computer Entertainment, such as the Jumping Flash! series and Kuma Uta. The company is also currently developing an unannounced game for the Sony PSP, which Morikawa hints will feature a new gaming style.