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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this what Nintendo is already doing with hundreds of games?

https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/detail/2021/the-classic-ga...

Sure. But you can't buy them. You can only get them if you sign up for their monthly service, "Nintendo Switch Online." And you can't have all of them. You can only get the N64 games if you sign up for the separately monthly. "Expansion Pack" service. And you can't play them on multiple profiles. Your son can only play Mario 64 on his profile if you sign up for the "Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack + Family Pack" subscription, which is about $80 per year. It's so expensive because they bundled it with a bunch of other stuff (hooray now I can also play Switch games online and I have access to the latest patch for Animal Crossing and some extra tracks for Mario Kart).

But I just wanted to let my son Mario 64, and $80 per year is too much for that.

Pricing is a different complaint from hoarding copyrighted classics though.

Sure, Nintendo isn't pricing their franchises at the price point you want, but in context to the discussion they're at least re-releasing what they can and making them accessible.

(And if it was really about letting your son play Super Mario World, you can pay $8 and he can play it for three months)

It's not just the price, though. Selling, say, Super Mario Bros. for $5 would be bad enough, but Nintendo has been forcing people to buy the same games over and over again because there's no way to move them to newer consoles when they come out.

(I could be wrong about this. If so, please correct me.)

No you're right, but a lifetime license to software on all platforms is a losing proposition for any company, since there are non-trivial costs to re-releasing on new technology.

Also it may be easy to link digital purchases right now, but proving past cartridge purchases would be very difficult.

They actually got rid of exactly that. You cannot buy Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo Switch. You can only subscribe to a service that contains Super Mario Bros.

They are not releasing everything they can. They still cling to the idea of releasing games drip-feed. The apps for Switch do not have every single wholly owned Nintendo title. FAR from it.

Which is pretty typical of a release process that requires updating and testing software on platforms that are ~30 years apart.

> But I just wanted to let my son Mario 64, and $80 per year is too much for that.

Nintendo obviously agrees, since they charge less than that for Mario 64 on the Switch.

https://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-3D-All-Stars-Nintendo-Swi...

It even comes bundled with Galaxy.

People complained about this release - seems like some people will complain about anything short of free - but I thought it was a pretty good value.

Well, the obvious complaint is that it was time-limited. That was a ridiculous decision, and the complaining is richly deserved.

I don't see any problem with the content, though.

The complaints were that the digital release was available for a limited time only. It's even more insulting that they're still selling the physical cartridge version of it. But if you want to own it digitally keeping the store page on their servers for more than 6 months was too difficult? I specifically didn't buy this because I don't want to normalize the trend of time-limited digital game sales. Shutting down your online store long after a product lifespan is over is understandable. But a 6 month purchase window is just trying to profit off of FOMO

https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/detail/2021/super-mario-3d...

> It's even more insulting that they're still selling the physical cartridge version of it.

Are they still manufacturing the cartridges, or did it just sell really poorly?

Officially, the cartridges stopped production around the same date the digital version was "taken down". It just sold exactly as poorly as every other retrogaming/nostalgia cash grab remake, and I say that as someone that bought it and has preordered the Advance Wars remakes. The only reason you can still find cartridges of the 3D remakes is that third party sellers (amazon, gamestop etc) still have tons of stock of it.

They're doing an incredibly slow drip feed to keep people subscribed. There's tons of titles they own 100% and are not available so they can 'add' a new ROM every month or two.

Which is pretty typical of a release process that requires updating and testing software on platforms that are ~30 years apart.

> that requires updating and testing software

If this were the actual reason, Ocarina of Time would not have released on it with so many graphical glitches and input lag which they eventually fixed later.

Short of anyone here working at Nintendo, we have no insight into what the bar is for release, the LOE to fix graphical bugs, or any of the challenges they face between platforms.

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