What do you think of the idea of releasing a cartridge-only homebrew title?

[plainsteve]

Wow! There are some NES homebrew projects that have had quite successful Kickstarter campaigns!

I seem to be interested in making a cartridge-only homebrew (no digital release), primarily because of custom cartridge constraints. (I have some big ideas!)

One method I could use to assess the "commercial viability" (lol wut?) of such a project is to (mostly) make the game and then run a Kickstarter campaign; then I will have my answer.

But, I thought I would here first. What do you think of the idea of releasing a cartridge-only homebrew title?

Thanks!

[TakuikaNinja]

I'll be frank here. It's impractical to completely prevent people from dumping games and/or emulating them, regardless of the intent (preservation vs piracy) - even commercially licensed Famicom games were being dumped during the console's commercial life. In fact, the act of using custom hardware/software to deter dumping just makes it more desirable for "hackers" - See the cracking scenes for Commodore & DOS computers.

I'd also argue that physical-only releases miss out on a larger audience (and by extension, the revenue) these days. Not everyone has access to the original hardware, and said hardware is also ageing. Custom boards also make it much harder to release digital versions later on, as emulators would need to be updated to support the mapper. A recent example: Malasombra takes a middle-ground by using SUROM (MMC1) for the digital release and a similar but custom board (NES-4MROM-512, assigned to NES 2.0 mapper 595) for the physical release.

The choice is ultimately up to you, but you should be aware of the consequences.

[Drag]

Excluding a digital release means you're cutting your audience down to a small niche. You'd have to be OK with a very small market of people who might purchase your cartridge, and an even fewer amount who will actually play the game in it.

So, it depends on what you want to get from it. If you want a bunch of people to play your game, then make a digital release available. If you don't care about that, like if you enjoy the niche aspect or the limited audience, then go with your heart and do cartridge only.


...but make sure whatever you're putting on that cartridge is something people will actually be interested in having, or else this will fall into "why did nobody buy my steam game" territory.

[segaloco]

For physical distro, you'll want to consider finding retailers that would be interested in your games. Small retro game stores, folks who can get things in peoples' faces. That's generally where oddball physical stuff tends to get picked up more. Nobody is going online to look for rando stuff, but they'll maybe consider something sitting in a brick and mortar. If you have retro game stores in your area, consider stopping by and seeing if there'd be any interest in having a new, modern title to stock on their shelves. Don't expect huge volume purchases, in fact, some may want to simply act as consignment instead. Still, I know I'm a lot more likely to buy random stuff I don't know much about if I see it on a shelf in front of me. Plus, then you can build a little community and hopefully find collaborators for future projects. If something *does* take off, then you've already got local business partners who can help with the logistics of wider-spread distro to the benefit of both of your businesses.

[Fiskbit]

I seem to be interested in making a cartridge-only homebrew (no digital release), primarily because of custom cartridge constraints. (I have some big ideas!)

I want to focus my answer on this specific part, since I think others have already covered the rest pretty well. There are tons of mappers already for the NES, and so most of the things you could ever want to do are already possible on this system, especially with more recent options like Broke Studio's Rainbow mapper. There certainly are unique things you could do with custom hardware, but you can already get things like powerful IRQ systems, massive ROMs, extended graphics capabilities, expansion audio, and WiFi support. We're seeing a lot of ideas for additional things that can be done in Something Nerdy Studios' Former Dawn cartridge hardware, but that game also has a massive budget (for the NES) of hundreds of thousands of dollars and many years of development time by many people. If you're not making a very big budget game, then I think it's hard to outgrow the capabilities of the cartridges we already have.

On the other hand, if a big part of what excites you about a project like this is designing hardware, that's a reason to design hardware and do something new. I would just suggest making sure that you really are doing something new so you're not just creating compatibility problems and narrowing your market without reason.

[tokumaru]

I think you'd be shooting yourself in the foot by not doing a digital release - if your game is good and people want to play it, someone will for sure dump it and distribute it, and soon there will be emulator support for it, meaning that there will be a digital version of your game out there whether you want it or not, but if you're not the one releasing it, you'll make zero money off of it. I'm not saying that an official digital release will prevent all piracy, but at least not EVERY copy of it will be pirated, and the people who want to support you will be able to do it.

[stan423321]

Sorry to continue preaching with the choir. I don't always have a working console, I sort of travel to work, and I'm considering a possibility of a need of evacuating my living area more and more recently, so I'm a person who will be very picky with physical-only retro console game Kickstarters. The base pricing also "helps". Then again, if the point is to have a small audience or feed the collector speculation market, these may be advantages to you.

On the custom hardware line, the big question is whether your bigideas are like most existing cartridge coprocessors and mappers, just more powerful, or something actually bound to physicality of the cartridge.

The sane subcase of the former case is that you make a new mapper in spite of existing emulators not supporting it. Then selling just the image as mystery meat and letting the community figure out is already a possibility. But you will presumably document your mapper for yourself and probably debug your game in an emulator that supports it, so, you know, why not put that out?

The insane subcase of the former case is that you make a new mapper to spite emulation, like Paprium on Mega Drive. For this to work, the mapper must be stupidly complicated, and you need a very high profile to justify the time developing it. But simultaneously, once your game is interesting enough, more people will look into cracking it.

The latter case is where a physical-only release could theoretically be more understandable. Such ideas include:

• Lock-On Technology / Game Genie / Wide Boy type things (emulators do actually handle the more interesting examples of such, possibly a pain on a frontloader)
• Something similar, but with its own external parts to rearrange, like a retro Lego Dimensions NFC clone, but with wired connections (need to eject the cartridge for rearrangement on a frontloader, a peripheral may make more sense, many gamers would rather rearrange stuff on the screen)
• A cartridge with programmable lights (apparently done in the past, also possibly nullified by frontloader)
• A psychological horror game cartridge with a rechargeable battery, a microphone and a speaker, that plays threats when you mute your TV, or way after you turn the console off (muffled by the frontloader)
• A cartridge with a whole SoC mapper that presents both a "classic graphics" version of the game on the NES output and a "remastered" version of the game emitted as one of standard television signals over the air for antenna reception (you may need to get a lawyer before even testing this, usable signals vary globally)
• A game that sets its user's house on fire on loss (obviously just don't)

If your ideas are something like this, then the lack of a digital release is still annoying, but less perplexing.

[plainsteve]

I'm not interested in thwarting piracy. The kind of custom hardware I have in mind would be more difficult to duplicate, but, of course, not strictly impossible.

I am interested in custom hardware to support my vision(s). ( Oh, Gawd, he's one of those...) Existing mappers I know of do not do what I want. Plus, it's easy enough to throw an FPGA into a NES cart and do "whatever", even on a game-by-game basis.

Regarding cutting down my audience: This is the main point I am seeking opinions on. However, looking at the Former Dawn Kickstarter page and summarizing the visible backing data there, I see that 86 percent of the funding amount came from backers supporting tiers including a cartridge (not digital-only tiers)! See attachment below.

A quick sift through other NES homebrew Kickstarter campaigns showed similar trends; digital-only backers are a smaller percentage of total backers. Am I off?

Maybe those of you who have commercially released cartridges have some insight.

Thanks for your comments!

FormerDawnKickstarter.png

[Joe]

However, looking at the Former Dawn Kickstarter page and summarizing the visible backing data there, I see that 86 percent of the funding amount came from backers supporting tiers including a cartridge (not digital-only tiers)!

How much of the funding came from people who bought only the cartridge without any digital versions of the game?

[Fiskbit]

Former Dawn is not a good example, which I tried to explain in my previous post. This is a game that has been in development for 6+ years and had at least hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on it. Its cartridge technology has taken tremendous effort to develop and contains a lot of complexity because of the creator's desire to achieve a certain level of authenticity for the time period while also avoiding a coprocessor. This means the cartridge itself is a major selling point and a big reason so many people wanted a cartridge version.

Despite that, the developers didn't want people backing for a cartridge reward; the cost of fulfilling these pledges is high (and getting higher), so a large part of their funding goal will end up going to cartridge fulfillment instead of development. They wanted pledges to be primarily digital and are ultimately expecting a huge portion of their sales to be from digital copies. The people excited about getting in early, though, are the NES enthusiasts who are particularly interested in the cartridge technology, and the campaign ultimately had to offer more cartridge tiers because it otherwise wasn't going to hit its funding goal.

I don't know what you're planning to make, but is it really something like Former Dawn, an epic game that uses advanced cartridge technology as a major part of its identity? Are you planning to spend many years and a large budget making your game? Is your planned cartridge design really different from what you can already do with the very wide array of available NES mappers (and are you actually sure about this)? Do you really have plans on how to meaningfully use this unique hardware in your game for things you couldn't otherwise do? And most importantly, are you really willing to sacrifice the potential sales of digital copies on mainstream platforms like Steam and Switch that have a wider reach than just the small group of NES enthusiasts excited about a homebrew cartridge?

I don't think it makes financial sense to release a game cartridge-only, and I also don't think it makes sense from the perspective of getting your game into the hands of as many customers as you can so people can enjoy it.

[plainsteve]

In general, I want to make an NES game (purists will disagree), not a Steam game. When I saw the money numbers for NES homebrew Kickstarter campaigns (even excluding Former Dawn), I thought maybe there's a chance to make a little money with a project I am very passionate about but could not justify doing presently to only break even. I didn't know people were tossing so much money at NES homebrew!'

Great points. Thank you, all. Like, I said, maybe I am missing something. I don't have all the data.

How much of the funding came from people who bought only the cartridge without any digital versions of the game?

I don't know because the cartridge'd tiers include the digital release.

Former Dawn is not a good example...

I understand. As I said, though the trend looking at other NES homebrew titles on Kickstarter seem to me to indicate a demand for a cartridge. A market beyond a Kickstarter campaign may indeed be tightly focused on a digital release.

I don't know what you're planning to make, but is it really something like Former Dawn, an epic game that uses advanced cartridge technology as a major part of its identity?

Yes. I am pro.

[gauauu]

Despite everyone here saying "your market will be too small" -- Retrotainment Games has been doing cartridge-only NES releases for years (until this year), and they've been successful enough to support multiple people doing this as a full time job.

A quick sift through other NES homebrew Kickstarter campaigns showed similar trends; digital-only backers are a smaller percentage of total backers. Am I off?

It depends on the game and the kickstarter, but in my experience, digital sales are significant but not the majority.

The Storied Sword, my most recent KS, had 129 rom-only backers, and 314 physical cartridge backers. Now that the game has been out for awhile, the number of digital rom sales on itch are about equal to physical sales in any given quarter. My NES Anguna had a similar ratio of digital to physical sales.

[gauauu]

I think you'd be shooting yourself in the foot by not doing a digital release - if your game is good and people want to play it, someone will for sure dump it and distribute it, and soon there will be emulator support for it, meaning that there will be a digital version of your game out there whether you want it or not, but if you're not the one releasing it, you'll make zero money off of it. I'm not saying that an official digital release will prevent all piracy, but at least not EVERY copy of it will be pirated, and the people who want to support you will be able to do it.

While I generally agree with you that pirates almost always find a way....As a counter this this, as far as I know, Star Keeper NEVER got dumped and distributed. (until recently when the creator posted some new version himself). I think this was due to a combination of being a custom weird mapper made only for this game, a limited physical distribution (so there weren't as many opportunities for it to get dumped), and community goodwill.

[Drag]

It depends on the game and the kickstarter, but in my experience, digital sales are significant but not the majority.

The Storied Sword, my most recent KS, had 129 rom-only backers, and 314 physical cartridge backers. Now that the game has been out for awhile, the number of digital rom sales on itch are about equal to physical sales in any given quarter. My NES Anguna had a similar ratio of digital to physical sales.

Do the people getting the physical cartridge also get a digital copy, or is it physical-only in all circumstances, with digital always a separate purchase?

Edit: Asking because it's not a big deal to get a cartridge you can't use, as long as you also get a ROM you can use; in that case, the cartridge is just a neat trinket. However, if these figures are for people getting a cartridge and not getting a ROM, that changes things a bit, but I would still wonder how many cartridge-only owners are actually playing the cartridge.

[Fiskbit]

Despite everyone here saying "your market will be too small" -- Retrotainment Games has been doing cartridge-only NES releases for years (until this year), and they've been successful enough to support multiple people doing this as a full time job.

Well, it depends what the topic creator means by 'no digital release'. Retrotainment hasn't been selling ROMs (although that might've changed recently?), but as far as I'm aware, they've had digital versions of their games at least on Steam for years. Admittedly, the number of reviews is small, so I don't know how successful they've been there, but they've put 4 games on Steam between 2016-2023.

Regarding Kickstarter stats, I don't know that Kickstarter is a great metric for how the versions of the game will sell after the campaign. A lot of games have a single physical run and the Kickstarter campaign is your only opportunity to get a physical copy, and there's often not that compelling a reason to buy a game digitally during a campaign when it will probably be available after the game is actually finished when there's no longer any risk that you won't get the product you paid for. The Kickstarter backers are also the most enthusiastic customers, who are more willing to throw larger amounts of money at the game and get all the rewards. These stats are helpful for understanding campaigns, but I think you have to look elsewhere to understand post-campaign sales.