27 Years Ago, Nintendo Almost Revolutionized Digital Games with Nintendo Power | Hacker News Reader

27 Years Ago, Nintendo Almost Revolutionized Digital Games with Nintendo Power

xatakaon.com

50 pointsrbanffy12 comments

> The in-store video game terminals will allow players to select the game they want to record and add it to their cart at a price ranging from $10 to $40.

I hadn't heard of this before, but it's clearly a successor to the Famicom Disk System, which worked exactly the same way but with rewritable floppies.

The Famicom Disk System was an awesome concept to bad it never made its way outside of Japan.

So really Nintendo invented the ROM

This is one of those things where there was a clear desire but the technology was far too immature to make it happen in a cogent fashion.

That could summarize a huge chunk of tech ideas in the 90's.

The key technologies here was cheap storage and widely available broadband, which both arrived by the mid 2000's. Thus Steam, and the entire online catalog of the Xbox 360/Ps3 and beyond.

It sounds like it was mostly an issue with releasing so late in the SNES lifecycle more than anything. I bet the original cartridge was quite expensive but how long until you recoup?

Remember, in 1997 you were going to shop anyways. Major stores investing in the writer would be a no-brainer.

Arguably, those would have made it infeasible for their general business model.

I think the digital pricing on those only works for the same reasons that Epic's "give away free games to get people to pay attention to our platform" 'works' - some of the games become not profitable on their own but simply having them has network effects b/c then it improves the perception that "anything you want can be found on here", and since you have finite space on the cart at a time, and nobody can sell you one with more, you don't have such a risk of people making verbatim identical replicas of a cart with every game possible preloaded at a cost well below the service's pricing for such.

In the modern storage/bandwidth era, I believe a large collection of many SNES ROMs on archive.org is around half a GB total, compressed, so even assuming they were getting 20:1 compression or only had 10% of the games or something, ~10GB is absolutely trivial to land on flash these days, so if Nintendo directly tried to offer something like this now, absent much more invasive copy protection than the SNES ever had, the business model would be broken.

(I suspect this is a large part of why their model with the Switch is a subscription service to "yes" with additional subscriptions for higher demand/cost ratio things - they probably have some data from the 3DS and Wii/Wii U that shows people had a couple of favorites they would absolutely buy on "Virtual Console", but the long tail of things don't get people buying much, whereas with such a subscription service, they probably make more consistent amounts of money, and they don't have to worry about that pesky "people can play it forever" problem...)

e: I should also mention that Nintendo Power wasn't unique in this value proposition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel was a cute service, for example. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview was also a pretty direct predecessor.

Sega had basically the same service several years earlier - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel

Reading that linked Next Generation magazine was very nostalgic.

Well I'm glad they didn't and we got a few more years of physical media and the property rights inherent therein.

Satellite View was much more forward thinking in terms of what we have today. Download games straight to your console

I think that if this had been available in France, people would have used it to copy games big time.

Sega Channel was very similar to this, and was completely awesome.

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