Nintendo Discontinues the NES Classic Edition
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If anyone has more information than my 3rd hand comment, I'd be super interested. I was very disappointed not to find one for sale for a reasonable price. I would have loved one.
On the other hand, Nintendo's been burned before by apparently-boundless demand for, say, the Wii U, and then incredibly sharp dropoff, so they might just be going heavily conservative on the possible profit/possible cost to update.
That would forbid dynamic updates (which would let them play cat-and-mouse with fixing holes, if they were so inclined), but would also avoid most things that would require replacing the OS stack.
e: They also clearly knew they weren't building a fortress, given the note buried in the image of "Many efforts, tears and countless hours have been put into this jewel. So, please keep this place tidied up and don't break everything!"
If Nintendo proactively found a bunch of EOL parts they could make a nice limited edition product out of, the buy the parts at a steep discount, sell the 'limited edition' at a price premium, and maximize their gross margin. Frankly I've never met a procurement manager with the guts to do something like that but I'm sure they are out there.
Although it's Nintendo and they're kind of known for not catching some of the easy throws.
If margins on a custom SOC+board are razor-thin, it would be idiocy from the company's pov to add cost and complexity to a project just to result in a decimation of the product's profitability.
Sourcing a bunch of inexpensive parts and throwing together something like the NES Classic Edition to fill the gap in an otherwise Nintendo-less holiday season seems to fit that mantra.
Yokoi made some of the first toys (for personal enjoyment, out of spare parts in a factory) which, when Nintendo's young president Yamauchi saw them, convinced him to really commit to the consumer toy space.
A similar board to what was in the NES Classic, the OrangePi One, is $9.99 retail, and I'm sure Nintendo could put in under 20hrs of work total to add what they need to the board and stay within a dollar or two of that board's price point.
The only question is why aren't there chinese made FullHD LED projectors in the cheaper price range?
Maybe as people still buy the 320x200, 800x400 and HD (1280x800) LED projectors. It would take one chinese manufacturer to change the cycle, if he releases a 1920x1080 FullHD LED projector for $300 or less.
I don't think this is the best example, accelerometers were not a cheap common part at the time. The Wii predates the iPhone, MEMS accelerometers were not anywhere near as widely deployed as they are now and they cost an order of magnitude or two more.
I can remember hobbyists buying Wii Remotes after launch just to rip out the sensors :)
IMO, perfect example is the B&W LCD on the original DMG Gameboy. A generation behind the competition, but cheap and low-power for the time.
The rest of the Wii hardware however..
I'm hoping they're going to re-release this in the near future or something similar that is at a similar price point but let's you play a back catalog of NES, SNES and N64 games. If they had a legal way for me to do that I would pick it up in a heart beat.
I guess the alternative is offering all these classic games on the Switch but is the target audience really the same? A $300 handheld versus a $60 dedicated classic TV console?
I also wonder if Nintendo could destroy the market of cheap / gimmicky consoles that you can buy for like $50 that include "150 games!". Release something that anyone can afford, hook it up to an e-store and let game devs release cheap games on it. It would be like hooking up the N64 / SNES / NES consoles with online services.
I think I rambled a little bit but hopefully it made sense.
I mean, really, a million companies have tried it and found it didn't work. You'd have to really bank on Nintendo name recognition to think there is a chance.
I agree and I think it would really work for Nintendo because they actually have tons of older games people would want whereas many of the attempts in the past offered only indie or no-name games.
In my opinion Nintendo is literally the only company that could pull it off.
Mr. Sterling has preached about Nintendo many times before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRicuKHmjZA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_vGe68T6sM
[0] http://www.polygon.com/2015/1/21/7867965/conservative-stuffy...
> "Nintendo is not only a Japanese company, it is a Kyoto-based company," he said, replying to a question about the difficulty of effecting change at Nintendo. "For people who aren't familiar, Kyoto-based are to Japanese companies as Japanese companies are to U.S. companies. They're very traditional, and very focused on hierarchy and group decision making. Unfortunately, that creates a culture where everyone is an advisor and no one is a decision maker, but almost everyone has veto power."
Nintendo needs a competitor. Sony and Microsoft are competitors of each other; Nintendo has not been in that fight for over a decade now.
I'd be hard pressed to define exactly what Nintendo is, though, and what kind of competitor it needs.
You've posted that comment on a marketing move out of left field that happened to be extremely effective.
Or maybe they want to start selling NES titles on the Switch and they don't want to compete with themselves or something?
Am I weird for thinking that it's very likely that an entire company with over 100 years of experience _does_ know something that you don't?
tl;dr: Sony gets backstabbed by Nintendo, proceeds to destroy them in their own staple industry for the next few decades by releasing Sony Playstation.
I know a lot of people who haven't played video games since they were kids who wanted the NES Classic, it has a unique appeal.
I would be shocked if the Virtual Console wasn't running on the Switch by the end of the year.
This isn't Nintendo's first super-popular product after all, at some point it boils down to them not caring enough to invest in their supply chain to keep enough stock on the shelves. Stores receiving five consoles at a time is a joke.
High prices, not being able to play some SNES games available for the Wii on the 3DS (wtf, just let play FFVI on the go), poor library (I know, licenses, but still), etc. make feel like they don't care.
Nintendo and Twitter are extremely similar. Twitter lucked into an AAA product, and management hasn't been able to leverage it to anything like the Facebook competitor it should have been.
Nintendo lucked into hiring a game design genius (Miyamoto) who also happened to be a great mentor and producer, meaning they've had a steady stream of AAA games for 30+ years.
If either one of these companies had great CEOs, they would easily be dominating their respective industries.
Hiroshi Yamauchi deserves credit for having the vision to expand into electronic games, but nothing they did before Miyamoto could truly be considered a market-shaping event.
Other than switching to electronics and hiring Miyamoto, Yamauchi was a middling CEO at best.
Super Mario is one of the most recognizable characters in the world. The NES sold 60 million units. The SNES sold 50 million units.
If a great CEO had been running Nintendo at any point since ~1983, Nintendo would be Disney right now.
Like a TV network cancelling a series with good ratings because an executive wants to put something else in it's slot to further his legacy.
Or a company hiring and promoting someone unqualified because they remind the director of themselves earlier in life.
Or a game company ending a successful series because the head of software was tired of making it.
In the future if Nintendo were to re-release the NES Classic (or a SNES Classic) the demand, hype and publicity would be astronomical.
I believe that decision almost killed Disney—they stopped making new films, and they made their classic films difficult or impossible to come by, and ended up with kids that didn't know or care who any of their characters were. I'm glad they turned that one around.
Discontinuation makes sense, because that console was a dead end, you couldn't add more games etc, so IMO it was more of a novelty.
As for releasing, it would be better if they make it not a dead end product.
Someone mentioned here that many chips using there were already EOL when it was released, so maybe this was a creative way to get rid of some components and make money out of them that otherwise they would throw away?
That doesn't make much sense. Not everyone who currently wants one has got one. They're absolutely flying off shelves. You wouldn't discontinue something like that because it's "a novelty."
All I'm saying is that when they came up with it, they planned it to be a dead end, e.g. fixed number of games, no ability to purchase games (either physically or download from internet), build using components that are EOL and no longer being produced...
It was actually quite simple. Starting from opening the box on the RPi, that I'd never touched before, being kind of a Linux moron, and tracking down the necessary hardware (an old TV and USB joystick, and some networking stuff), I had it running in just a couple of hours.
The only thing that slowed me down at all was figuring out how to copy ROM files onto it through the network.
Just go to the pirate bay and download an emulator.
And anyways, that's not Nintendo making it easy, that's the people who build emulators and rip ROMs making it easy.
https://w2.eff.org/IP/eff_fair_use_faq.php
Also see the 1984 Betamax decision and the 1999 Rio MP3 player decision.
Owning a cartridge may give you the ability to legally download the same software but it certainly doesn't give you permission to supply copyrighted works to other people.
Downloading ROMs is almost certainly illegal. Dumping cartridges one owns is almost certainly legal. I'm not saying that you shouldn't download ROMs, just that it isn't legally justified.
The EFF says nowhere at that page that downloading files is legal. It does say that backup copies are.
I had an NES as a kid, rebought an NES in college with most of my childhood games, and bought quite a few games on Wii virtual console. These games arent easily portable, take up a lot of space, and I'm not even sure how to hook an NES up to a modern TV offhand. NES won't give me simplicity for the games I've paid for, so by definition of terrible copyright laws, I resort to "piracy". And while im there, theres other games i always wanted to try as a kid, that nintendo will make difficult for me to play (heck, if I went to piracy for legally owned games, why would games i dont own be any easier). It's a vicious cycle.
steam has demonstrated that you can easily cut piracy simply by making things readily available and easy to use. dont give people incentive and then complain about it.
The original NES had RCA composite output (plus audio) - so all you'd need is a composite-to-HDMI adaptor, like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Portta-Composite-Converter-Scaler-sup...
For something like the Sega Genesis (not that you wondered), it also had composite output, but needed a "special" mini-DIN cable; the pinout is out there, and an RCA jack can be soldered in place if you wanted. Also, the same jack (IIRC) served up S-VIDEO, so you could use that instead (S-VIDEO to HDMI).
If all you had was RF output (like for an Atari 2600) - you could do a RF-to-Composite converter, then from that into a Composite-to-HDMI converter.
Where you might run into problems on all of these solutions are those areas where artifacting was used on-screen to generate false colors; sometimes the converters will strip that out (their conversion is too good), or the TV will (same thing, plus LCD vs CRT tech).
Granted, it's $450, but it plays your games perfectly, and on your modern hardware in ways that an original NES couldn't without RGB modding a top-loader and getting a separate upscaler.
I'm a retro speedrunner, and I intend on getting one later this year rather than modding my 30-year old NES (which I self-refurbish) and buying an upscaler and having a nest of cables.
Hobbyists are making some amazing stuff. Someone is currently making component cables that work with your SNES, as well as ones for the Sega Genesis and Sega Saturn. I'm on the waiting list to pounce when the next batch arrives. It's like classic cars. In the 60s no one cared. In the 80s and 90s people built businesses to fill the niche and take all the money being left on the table.
Where does Analogue NT fit in there? That's not ORIGINAL hardware. It could technically have different quirks that means minor differences could play out. That puts it more in the emulator category right?
They had some of the most hardcore folks in the emulation community included in the development. The guys who designed it wanted it to be reference quality. It supports all the options of every NES made, including full support for custom sound chips (like FDS versions of Castlevania 3, which sound amazing), and stuff like the PowerPak and Everdrive -- because to the game, it IS the NES.
It's exactly why I'm getting one myself. As a speedrunner, reference quality (whether on hardware or software) is a requirement for me to have my world records be considered legit.
That could just as easily describe the NES-101 or SNS-101. You can always find some difference if you look hard enough, even with original hardware (hardcore SNES and Neo Geo players care a lot about a console's serial number; a few Commodore 64 fans and musicians care about the date code on a SID chip). In principle, you're correct. In practice, I think you'll have a hard time finding anyone who's genuinely pickier about NES accuracy than Kevin Horton.
Why? What's wrong about Nintendo continuing to monetize their old IP, which is still apparently in high demand? If anything, Nintendo managing to continue making money off of these old games is impressive.
So either it's old and unimportant, or they're a stagnating old company. And considering how well switch + breath of the wild sales were, I'm pretty sure NES games make up a pretty small portion of their revenue.
Why should a company be able to strangle the cultural development of our society in the name of greed?
As far as I'm concerned, I've bought those games about 2 or 3 times, my conscience is clear for format shifting to an emulation box.
BTW, Nintendo and their Yakudza internet patrols don't care and you don't need darknet torrents to get ROMs, they're everywhere. Emulators are mostly opensource and banned only on iOS because iOS is for Clash of Kings and not for retrocomputing.
Ideally, though - for absolutely-true-legal (pinky shake) - you'd have to build a device to read out the ROM from that cartridge, store it, then play that copy (and only that copy).
Essentially - all of this boils down to it being legal to make a backup of the software media that you own. Then again, DVDs and CSS changed some of that, so...I dunno.
Now with this sudden announcement, no doubt those have vanished and I won't see one again without paying as much as a Switch ($300+) for one. Thanks, Nintendo. You're really listening to your fans here.
Or maybe in additional to supply issues it was relatively expensive to produce?
It could be that their virtual console once-released may be in competition for sales of classic games.
* RetroPie - Retro-gaming on the Raspberry Pi || https://retropie.org.uk/
Now, while emulators are legal, ROMs may not. I wish Nintendo and others could release a desktop version of their legacy games shop.
I understand their business is "software sells hardware", but in the case of legacy games they could bring more revenue if they were a bit more open.
Have yet to see stock anywhere except through scalpers. Nintendo continues to have a huge supply problem with basic availability of hardware, for whatever reason.
Would buy one in a heartbeat. Not going to reward a scumbag scalper by spending a penny over MSRP to do so though.
I don't know how low-latency the RetroN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RetroN) is but you can use the original games and gamepads with that. I think it's android-based, so it's a software emulator.
[0]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Nintendo...