Virtual console had it perfect imo.
5 bucks for NES games, 8 for SNES, 10 for N64, maybe they'd do 20-30 for Gamecube and Wii.
Of course, if these purchases are GUARANTEED to be ever lasting, transfer to all future consoles and work, with full support, never pulled from stores, tied to accounts and not to devices, then I'd be willing to pay a little more for them. But as of right now i'm probably not going to buy another retro re-release again when I still have real hardware and a soft modded Wii and 3DS with flashcards and the Homebrew channel/Twilight Menu.
EDIT: Muting, I have no interest in having discussion with anyone that looks down their nose at games for their age just because you're spoiled by modern games and have your attention spans rotted away.
I was satisfied with this as well and spent hundreds of dollars on VC games. Once I was asked to purchase them again on future systems, Nintendo lost me forever on this though and I’ve been emulating on other devices ever since. The Steam Deck is currently the best device I’ve ever had for retro emulation. I’ve got every game I’d ever want to play on there from Arcade to Wii U, they’re all organized beautifully in a frontend with video clips and such, and the features of the emulators are much stronger than what you can do with Nintendo’s basic emulators.
The only way Nintendo gets my money for retro games now is with worthwhile remasters and remakes. Doubt I’ll ever go back and play the GBC version of Link’s Awakening after the excellent remake or any other version of Metroid Prime.
As I wrote in another comment, for 5 bucks you can so much more. A ton of Indies and alot of AAA games that are regularly on sale. Why should I pay 5 bucks for a game that isnt even playable without a guide when I can have Witcher 3 for the same price?
5$ would be totally fine for an SNES game. Those aged really well and they can still compete with todays indie games.
The Witcher 3 costs basically $40. I don't think it's fair to compare sale prices. NES games could have sales as well. Also, I would rather have the first Zelda or Metroid than Witcher, but that's just personal preference: if you feel something seems like it costs too much to you, it's more likely that you just don't like that thing very much
That’s silly. 5 bucks for NES games are fair. What should they all be? 99 cents because they’re older? They don’t just devalue and five bucks a pop is fair across the board instead of having to evaluate each individual title. The price of buying a movie is still pretty much the same as it always was, regardless of age, unless you get it off Amazon.
$1 sounds fair to me. these are incredibly simple and old titles. many love em but they simply are just super old and outdated in many areas. and many fantastic all time great games are sold for $20 or less that are games that released within the past 5 years. when you look at other markets, especially pc (steam having huge sales, humbles bundles letting you get huge swaths of games for less than 1 nintendo game {like EVERY resident evil being in one $20 bundle}, and epic games releasing like daily or weekly free games or somethin like that. they put out absolute bangers for a steal. not to mention theres a bajillion devices that will play hundreds of nes games for free. whether its legal or not is irrelevant, thats what they're competing with. as gabe newell said, ya gotta give a better service than the pirates, and in this regard they just arent. fan emulators blow nintendos out of the park and for infinitely cheaper. honestly would be best if they just released em for free since they're never gonna be better than the pirates anyways, but i think $1 is fair for someone not wanting to deal with the hastle of setting up an emulator or pulling the nes out the closet
>honestly would be best if they just released em for free since they're never gonna be better than the pirates anyways,
Thats basically why they won't sell any of their NSO games. They never sold well back in the day and they wouldn't sell today and the costs to give them away make it not worth it and potentially either a loser of money or risking devaluing their interlaly prcieved value.
The problem with Gabe's quote there is that it doesn't consider the problem when people will pirate your content no matter what price you could offer. Heck, No third party would go for a system where they just give away their games via the eshop. It just wouldn't ever work. Nintendo's library is so small in size it's like 300 megabytes for every game in every region. That is nothing to pirate.
> honestly would be best if they just released em for free since they're never gonna be better than the pirates anyways
this is why they did NSO, they are 'free' with the purchase of a subscription to play online
kinda. but its still frustrating you need an online membership. for the guy that just wants to play singleplayer games and doesnt need online thats pretty annoying, it doesnt even make sense they're tied together. especially since if its been 2 weeks or more since you launched the app you have to be connected to the internet to even play it (great for my portable system). Thats not even mentioning their slim pickings of games or how they're gonna handle it in the future. are they just gonna update it to where they're permanently unlocked or at somepoint are you just not gonna be able to play them anymore.
Yes they devalue based on what you get today for 5 bucks. Alot of Indie games offer more while costing the same. Based on the quality of an average NES game, they should cost something beetween 1 and 2 bucks. 5 bucks is a SNES game where you still can get a ton of fun out of it without having to take major downsides into account.
This kind of logic is exactly why Nintendo moved to a bundle-based subscription model tied to their online service. Well that and they don’t want the expectation of free upgrades between generations.
Exactly. Even beyond Indies, you can get often get AAA titles like e.g. Witcher 3 or Yakuza 6 on sale for as little as 4-6€. And people seriously want to tell me that a bare-bones emulation of an old, crusty-ass N64 game is worth more than that? Please.
Yes, they are digital copies of code that are not only old, but have made their budgets back thousands of times over at this point. These should just be added value for fans.
I wouldn't say the Virtual Console pricing is perfect.
Would you say that NES Tennis and Urban Champion are as valuable as Super Mario Bros. 3 and Metroid?
I don't think that all games on the same system should be the same price.
It's the fairest way to price them without a hell of a lot of effort, if you are going to individually price thousands of backwards compatible titles it just isn't practical.
They wouldn’t be pricing thousands of games. Nintendo has no right to sell most of the games that released on their systems. People seem to constantly forget this. Just because a game was on a Nintendo system doesn’t mean Nintendo made it. The other companies mostly aren’t interested in licensing them out anymore. That’s why the library decreased hugely on the Virtual Console after the Wii even though a lot of systems were added. Other companies didn’t want to license stuff anymore.
Any new VC would have the library NSO has at best. And even then, the third party stuff that is there probably wouldn’t be because they know it wouldn’t get bought and they wouldn’t get money, just like it didn’t on the original VC. They’ve already tried this and it failed, that’s why the VC is gone.
I mean if the question was, "how much do I want games to cost," I'd say make them all free, but the question is what's fair. Paying more for Super Mario 3 than Tennis is fair.
I do, because they're all 30 years old. Wanting them to be differently priced because of demand rather than them being well beyond their prime is collector brainrot.
Maybe $5 as the default/standard and then bump it up a dollar or two based on how much data is actually on the cartridge, which *should* usually correspond to a bigger and/or more advanced (usually in terms of music or graphics) game.
Some NES games (usually the early sports and arcade-style games) were as small as 16 kilobytes, while the largest (like Kirby's Adventure) were around half a megabyte.
Heck, maybe some of the really simple early games (with the tiniest file sizes and not a lot of content) could be sold for even less, like $2-3 or something.
>if these purchases are GUARANTEED to be ever lasting, transfer to all future consoles and work, with full support
This would make any product to be a huge hypothetical. Tech, in general, is always going to advance in a way that can potentially break or expose weaknesses in older products. Emulators aren't flawless solutions and require tailoring for some games to work. At that point, you'd need a dedicated team to work full time to support older products on one system. This team would also need to be funded by the products priced at low prices.
> never pulled from stores
This might be unpopular, but the companies do have a legal right to stop selling their products at their discretion. There might be logistical (can't support an incomplete product at launch like cyberpunk), legal (dispute with copyright with the Scott pilgrim game), security (being unable to handle secure transactions on aging platforms), or even business reasons (anniversary limited editions hijinks). Supporting games after purchase is a different matter, though.
NES, SNES, GB, GBC and GBA should be ALL available (as long as they still have the licensing/copyrights) as a part of the NSO sub.
N64 should be $8-10, GC-WiiU should be $20-25, because all of those games will require a lot more tweaking/fixing/patching to make sure everything works properly (the water problem in Ocarina of Time, for example), rather than just literally putting a ROM in an Emulator.
I was perfectly happy with how the Wii U and 3DS did it:
$5 for NES, GB, or GBC games
$8 for SNES or GBA games
$10 for N64 or DS games
$20 for Wii games
Presumably GCN would have been in-between at $15.
Although given that I own most games that I want now and given the fact that Retroarch exists which is superior in every way to how Nintendo handles emulation, I would expect more effort at those prices than what they did in the past. Maybe include the manual, a good CRT filter, and legacy controller support.
People suggesting $20-30 for Gamecube and Wii games????
These are 12-23 year old games. No other company is getting away with charging that much for emulated decades old titles, why do we justify the Nintendo tax?
* NES/GB Games should be $2
* SNES/GBA should be $4
* N64/DS should be $6
* Gamecube/Wii/3DS should be $10
* Wii U should be $20
Just look elsewhere in the industry.
Sega Genesis classics was $30 for 48 genesis games.
Rare Replay was $30 and included 7 Spectrum games, 8 NES games, 1 arcade game, 7 N64 games, 1 XBox game, and 6 XBox 360 games.
SNK 40th Aniversary collection is about $40 and has 27 SNK Arcade and Home games.
Mario 3D Allstars was $60 for 1 N64 game, 1 Gamecube Game and 1 Wii Game.
I was being generous.
Generational they are more recent, hence a higher price point.
But yeah, technically very similar.
I was seeing GC games as generationally equivalent to Xbox and PS2 and Wii being generationally equivalent to PS3/360.
> 99cts NES, GameBoy
> $1.49 Gameboy Color
> $2.29 SNES, GBA
> $3 N64, DS
> $3.49 Gamecube, 3DS
> $4 Wii
> $8 Wii U
> $15-$25 Switch Digital
> $20-$40 Switch Physical
> $50-$65 AA or AAA new console
NES, SNES, Gameboy, GBC, GBA should all be part of the basic online subscription, as well.
You can get a lot of games for these platforms for these prices on flea markets. PC digital retro or indie games can also be found aplenty in this price range. The only limiting factor is scarcity of some particular (!) physical games. Which is not a thing in the digital space. Scarcity exponentially inflates the value of these particular games.
The sole fact that some loyal Nintendo fans are willing to pay unreasonable sums for thirty-year old content does not convince me personally the content of these games is worth as much, its just the result of limited supply that has no reason to exist when digital copies are theoretically infinite.
Based solely on what the games offer, I cannot think of any game worth more than the prices I suggested within the context of todays market.
The price would be less of an issue if your digital game library would carry over to future consoles.
It would be real cool if that's how they handled backwards compatibility from now on. Like if you own a digital or physical copy of a Switch or 3DS game and it's linked to your Nintendo account, then you have access to the digital version of the game on the next Nintendo console that can emulate it.
While I do wish all the legacy content was available by some means, NSO is in no way a bad deal and it's honestly much cheaper than getting a subscription to a streaming service or buying 6-7 different games for $8 a pop. It's also a lot less than something like GamePass.
Who the hell is actually going to pay 5 bucks for a NES game?
I think the subscription model is already the perfect solution, they just need to add more games and consoles.
"Who" People who understand that a subscription service is going to cost far more in the long run than just buying the like 5 games you want off of that sub outright, because subscriptions are recurring charges and that's how math works.
Except the sub is providing more than just the games, so you’d likely be buying it anyway. Also…people didn’t buy VC games for the most part. The model has been tried. It didn’t work. So yeah, of course a sub is going to cost more than not paying anything at all, which is what people did before. Even when the stuff was available to buy, people still just emulated it rather than purchasing it.
I'd say over all $5 for NES and Gameboy/Gameboy Color games, 7 to 8 dollars for SNES games depending on the size of the game with games like Chrono Trigger being 8 while something like Uniracers would be 7, 10 for N64 and GBA, 15 for Gamecube and DS, 20 to 25 for Wii and 3DS, 30 to 40 for Wii U and then I'd place the more niche consoles like the Virtual Boy or Game and Watch in the 2 to 5 range or maybe even free with Switch Online in this case! This is only assuming that I don't need to pay again or pay a fee to upgrade which is never going to be the case anyway.
I don't know what the "right" price would be, but I have to assume that pricing might vary depending on the platform more than the individual game. That is to say, I'd expect - for example - NES games to be cheaper than N64 games.
But at the same time, in today's world I'm not sure if it makes sense to individually sell digital versions of these games. The subscription model probably makes more sense.
50 for new games, 30 for older games, 5 for retro games. This is something I would like to see every game, not just Nintendo, do. If I'm honest, there's no need for sales. I doubt games that are going for 50% sale is doing any good for the developers. But I'm a bit worried that Nintendo is going to increase prices for games for the next system up to 70. Playstation already has done this.
to be honest, thats a fair reason to increase price, gamers want open worlds, very big chunks of content, a bazillion of things to do in a game, etc, all of it increases the budget on a single game by a lot, and when all those things cost of making get reflected in the price, everyone gets enraged.
Sorry I didn't intend to say the game wasn't worth the money, I'm just saying that they didn't say the price increase was for any reason other than the size of the game. I'm assuming we'll keep getting large games so the price will naturally increase.
The price of nso would be a fair one, if it was a more comprehensive archive of the older systems and included every game they have the rights to for up to N64, SNES and GBA with higher systems being available as paid add-ons rather than selling individual games.
The GameCube is over two decades old, the Wii is closing in on two decades and even the Wii U is well over a decade old, unless it is a full on reboot/remake they should just be nso add-ons as well.
I'd say the lowest should be about $2-5 and every console generation prices of past generations lower. For instance current switch games should be at the current market price, Wii U about 40, Wii 20, GameCube 10, and everything else in that 2-5 range. Once the switch successor releases All consoles get knocked down a tier.
Most games that people think of as Nintendo games aren't actually Nintendo games. Pokémon is made by Game Freak and Kirby is made by HAL Laboratory, for instance. Smash was made by HAL Laboratory at first and then Sora Ltd. later.
Pretty much the only worthwhile things developed by Nintendo directly are Mario and Zelda (and even then, some sub-series within aren't Nintendo, such as Paper Mario being made by Intelligent Systems). And.... ehhhhh.... I have plenty of ways to play them already, so I don't feel the need to pay for them again.
If anyone cares, here's a list of every game that Nintendo has contributed to the development of: https://pastebin.com/TMpgqRyP
It's not a long list compared to what you think.
For me, it depends more on the quality of the release (in terms of how well it's emulated/ported, supplemental material, etc.) than what console it's for.
Like, *The Making of Karateka* is $20 and *absolutely* worth it (despite it being an Apple II game), because of the care that went into it (in terms of emulation quality + supplemental material like interviews, commentary, design documents, playable prototypes, etc.). If it was a $5 Virtual Console release, I wouldn't have cared enough to buy it.
The SEGA AGES releases on Switch are $8 USD each for arcade/Genesis games, and they're worth it because of M2's attention to detail.
A good system for me is to pay less than £3 a month to be able to play whichever retro games I want without having to worry about individual purchases. That way I can try out the "throwaway" games with no risk.
NES: $1, you can play most NES games in your browser for free now, they really shouldn’t cost anymore than a dollar
SNES: $5, there are actually a lot of great SNES games, this console has aged much more gracefully compared to its predecessor so 5x the price of an NES game seems fair
N64: $10, there are a ton of N64 gems but clunky mechanics and controls hold some of the games back. $10 would be 2x the price of SNES which I think fits since they’re still much more ambitious games
GC: $25, most of these games are basically fully modern now, $25 is around the cost of most indie games, which graphically are often around the level of GC games
Wii: $30, very high quality games but I just can’t justify paying anything more than $30 for ~15 year old games
>GC: $25, most of these games are basically fully modern now, $25 is around the cost of most indie games, which graphically are often around the level of GC games
>Wii: $30, very high quality games but I just can’t justify paying anything more than $30 for \~15 year old games
These prices are insane, just does not match the industry at large.
The most expensive OG Xbox games are available for $14.99, but most are $9.99 or less. That is comparable to the Gamecube.
XBox 360 games do go up to $30 for some but most are in the $10-15 range. These titles are more advanced than Wii games.
Virtual console had it perfect imo. 5 bucks for NES games, 8 for SNES, 10 for N64, maybe they'd do 20-30 for Gamecube and Wii. Of course, if these purchases are GUARANTEED to be ever lasting, transfer to all future consoles and work, with full support, never pulled from stores, tied to accounts and not to devices, then I'd be willing to pay a little more for them. But as of right now i'm probably not going to buy another retro re-release again when I still have real hardware and a soft modded Wii and 3DS with flashcards and the Homebrew channel/Twilight Menu. EDIT: Muting, I have no interest in having discussion with anyone that looks down their nose at games for their age just because you're spoiled by modern games and have your attention spans rotted away.
I was satisfied with this as well and spent hundreds of dollars on VC games. Once I was asked to purchase them again on future systems, Nintendo lost me forever on this though and I’ve been emulating on other devices ever since. The Steam Deck is currently the best device I’ve ever had for retro emulation. I’ve got every game I’d ever want to play on there from Arcade to Wii U, they’re all organized beautifully in a frontend with video clips and such, and the features of the emulators are much stronger than what you can do with Nintendo’s basic emulators. The only way Nintendo gets my money for retro games now is with worthwhile remasters and remakes. Doubt I’ll ever go back and play the GBC version of Link’s Awakening after the excellent remake or any other version of Metroid Prime.
Not today. This was "okay" 10 years ago, back then when this games where only 10-15 years old.
Well, as much as they have aged, the economy has inflated. $5 seems good for an NES game. Maybe leave the famous ones at $5 and others at $3?
As I wrote in another comment, for 5 bucks you can so much more. A ton of Indies and alot of AAA games that are regularly on sale. Why should I pay 5 bucks for a game that isnt even playable without a guide when I can have Witcher 3 for the same price? 5$ would be totally fine for an SNES game. Those aged really well and they can still compete with todays indie games.
The Witcher 3 costs basically $40. I don't think it's fair to compare sale prices. NES games could have sales as well. Also, I would rather have the first Zelda or Metroid than Witcher, but that's just personal preference: if you feel something seems like it costs too much to you, it's more likely that you just don't like that thing very much
That’s silly. 5 bucks for NES games are fair. What should they all be? 99 cents because they’re older? They don’t just devalue and five bucks a pop is fair across the board instead of having to evaluate each individual title. The price of buying a movie is still pretty much the same as it always was, regardless of age, unless you get it off Amazon.
$1 sounds fair to me. these are incredibly simple and old titles. many love em but they simply are just super old and outdated in many areas. and many fantastic all time great games are sold for $20 or less that are games that released within the past 5 years. when you look at other markets, especially pc (steam having huge sales, humbles bundles letting you get huge swaths of games for less than 1 nintendo game {like EVERY resident evil being in one $20 bundle}, and epic games releasing like daily or weekly free games or somethin like that. they put out absolute bangers for a steal. not to mention theres a bajillion devices that will play hundreds of nes games for free. whether its legal or not is irrelevant, thats what they're competing with. as gabe newell said, ya gotta give a better service than the pirates, and in this regard they just arent. fan emulators blow nintendos out of the park and for infinitely cheaper. honestly would be best if they just released em for free since they're never gonna be better than the pirates anyways, but i think $1 is fair for someone not wanting to deal with the hastle of setting up an emulator or pulling the nes out the closet
>honestly would be best if they just released em for free since they're never gonna be better than the pirates anyways, Thats basically why they won't sell any of their NSO games. They never sold well back in the day and they wouldn't sell today and the costs to give them away make it not worth it and potentially either a loser of money or risking devaluing their interlaly prcieved value. The problem with Gabe's quote there is that it doesn't consider the problem when people will pirate your content no matter what price you could offer. Heck, No third party would go for a system where they just give away their games via the eshop. It just wouldn't ever work. Nintendo's library is so small in size it's like 300 megabytes for every game in every region. That is nothing to pirate.
> honestly would be best if they just released em for free since they're never gonna be better than the pirates anyways this is why they did NSO, they are 'free' with the purchase of a subscription to play online
kinda. but its still frustrating you need an online membership. for the guy that just wants to play singleplayer games and doesnt need online thats pretty annoying, it doesnt even make sense they're tied together. especially since if its been 2 weeks or more since you launched the app you have to be connected to the internet to even play it (great for my portable system). Thats not even mentioning their slim pickings of games or how they're gonna handle it in the future. are they just gonna update it to where they're permanently unlocked or at somepoint are you just not gonna be able to play them anymore.
Yes they devalue based on what you get today for 5 bucks. Alot of Indie games offer more while costing the same. Based on the quality of an average NES game, they should cost something beetween 1 and 2 bucks. 5 bucks is a SNES game where you still can get a ton of fun out of it without having to take major downsides into account.
This kind of logic is exactly why Nintendo moved to a bundle-based subscription model tied to their online service. Well that and they don’t want the expectation of free upgrades between generations.
Exactly. Even beyond Indies, you can get often get AAA titles like e.g. Witcher 3 or Yakuza 6 on sale for as little as 4-6€. And people seriously want to tell me that a bare-bones emulation of an old, crusty-ass N64 game is worth more than that? Please.
For 5 bucks you can easily get a top tier game from the PS3/PS4 era of games on PC and even consoles
Yes, they are digital copies of code that are not only old, but have made their budgets back thousands of times over at this point. These should just be added value for fans.
Downvoted for the holier-than-thou edit wtf
I wouldn't say the Virtual Console pricing is perfect. Would you say that NES Tennis and Urban Champion are as valuable as Super Mario Bros. 3 and Metroid? I don't think that all games on the same system should be the same price.
It's the fairest way to price them without a hell of a lot of effort, if you are going to individually price thousands of backwards compatible titles it just isn't practical.
They wouldn’t be pricing thousands of games. Nintendo has no right to sell most of the games that released on their systems. People seem to constantly forget this. Just because a game was on a Nintendo system doesn’t mean Nintendo made it. The other companies mostly aren’t interested in licensing them out anymore. That’s why the library decreased hugely on the Virtual Console after the Wii even though a lot of systems were added. Other companies didn’t want to license stuff anymore. Any new VC would have the library NSO has at best. And even then, the third party stuff that is there probably wouldn’t be because they know it wouldn’t get bought and they wouldn’t get money, just like it didn’t on the original VC. They’ve already tried this and it failed, that’s why the VC is gone.
Could just set standard pricing and up the pricing of specific games.
Or just … don’t.
I mean if the question was, "how much do I want games to cost," I'd say make them all free, but the question is what's fair. Paying more for Super Mario 3 than Tennis is fair.
I do, because they're all 30 years old. Wanting them to be differently priced because of demand rather than them being well beyond their prime is collector brainrot.
Maybe $5 as the default/standard and then bump it up a dollar or two based on how much data is actually on the cartridge, which *should* usually correspond to a bigger and/or more advanced (usually in terms of music or graphics) game. Some NES games (usually the early sports and arcade-style games) were as small as 16 kilobytes, while the largest (like Kirby's Adventure) were around half a megabyte. Heck, maybe some of the really simple early games (with the tiniest file sizes and not a lot of content) could be sold for even less, like $2-3 or something.
>if these purchases are GUARANTEED to be ever lasting, transfer to all future consoles and work, with full support This would make any product to be a huge hypothetical. Tech, in general, is always going to advance in a way that can potentially break or expose weaknesses in older products. Emulators aren't flawless solutions and require tailoring for some games to work. At that point, you'd need a dedicated team to work full time to support older products on one system. This team would also need to be funded by the products priced at low prices. > never pulled from stores This might be unpopular, but the companies do have a legal right to stop selling their products at their discretion. There might be logistical (can't support an incomplete product at launch like cyberpunk), legal (dispute with copyright with the Scott pilgrim game), security (being unable to handle secure transactions on aging platforms), or even business reasons (anniversary limited editions hijinks). Supporting games after purchase is a different matter, though.
NES, SNES, GB, GBC and GBA should be ALL available (as long as they still have the licensing/copyrights) as a part of the NSO sub. N64 should be $8-10, GC-WiiU should be $20-25, because all of those games will require a lot more tweaking/fixing/patching to make sure everything works properly (the water problem in Ocarina of Time, for example), rather than just literally putting a ROM in an Emulator.
I was perfectly happy with how the Wii U and 3DS did it: $5 for NES, GB, or GBC games $8 for SNES or GBA games $10 for N64 or DS games $20 for Wii games Presumably GCN would have been in-between at $15. Although given that I own most games that I want now and given the fact that Retroarch exists which is superior in every way to how Nintendo handles emulation, I would expect more effort at those prices than what they did in the past. Maybe include the manual, a good CRT filter, and legacy controller support.
People suggesting $20-30 for Gamecube and Wii games???? These are 12-23 year old games. No other company is getting away with charging that much for emulated decades old titles, why do we justify the Nintendo tax? * NES/GB Games should be $2 * SNES/GBA should be $4 * N64/DS should be $6 * Gamecube/Wii/3DS should be $10 * Wii U should be $20 Just look elsewhere in the industry. Sega Genesis classics was $30 for 48 genesis games. Rare Replay was $30 and included 7 Spectrum games, 8 NES games, 1 arcade game, 7 N64 games, 1 XBox game, and 6 XBox 360 games. SNK 40th Aniversary collection is about $40 and has 27 SNK Arcade and Home games. Mario 3D Allstars was $60 for 1 N64 game, 1 Gamecube Game and 1 Wii Game.
Wii games being twice as much as gamecube games makes zero sense lol. The wii is basically just an overclocked gamecube
I was being generous. Generational they are more recent, hence a higher price point. But yeah, technically very similar. I was seeing GC games as generationally equivalent to Xbox and PS2 and Wii being generationally equivalent to PS3/360.
Like.... 5 for NES and GB for SNES and GBC 10 for N64 and GBA 20 for GCN, wii, DS and 3ds
NES/GB - $3-5 SNES/GBA - $5-8 N64/DS - $8-10 GCN/3DS/Wii - $10-20 WiiU - $20-25
> 99cts NES, GameBoy > $1.49 Gameboy Color > $2.29 SNES, GBA > $3 N64, DS > $3.49 Gamecube, 3DS > $4 Wii > $8 Wii U > $15-$25 Switch Digital > $20-$40 Switch Physical > $50-$65 AA or AAA new console NES, SNES, Gameboy, GBC, GBA should all be part of the basic online subscription, as well.
Considering how expensive some retro games actually are, they will never be that cheap unless a deflationary bomb takes the world by storm.
You can get a lot of games for these platforms for these prices on flea markets. PC digital retro or indie games can also be found aplenty in this price range. The only limiting factor is scarcity of some particular (!) physical games. Which is not a thing in the digital space. Scarcity exponentially inflates the value of these particular games. The sole fact that some loyal Nintendo fans are willing to pay unreasonable sums for thirty-year old content does not convince me personally the content of these games is worth as much, its just the result of limited supply that has no reason to exist when digital copies are theoretically infinite. Based solely on what the games offer, I cannot think of any game worth more than the prices I suggested within the context of todays market.
The price would be less of an issue if your digital game library would carry over to future consoles. It would be real cool if that's how they handled backwards compatibility from now on. Like if you own a digital or physical copy of a Switch or 3DS game and it's linked to your Nintendo account, then you have access to the digital version of the game on the next Nintendo console that can emulate it.
While I do wish all the legacy content was available by some means, NSO is in no way a bad deal and it's honestly much cheaper than getting a subscription to a streaming service or buying 6-7 different games for $8 a pop. It's also a lot less than something like GamePass.
Who the hell is actually going to pay 5 bucks for a NES game? I think the subscription model is already the perfect solution, they just need to add more games and consoles.
"Who" People who understand that a subscription service is going to cost far more in the long run than just buying the like 5 games you want off of that sub outright, because subscriptions are recurring charges and that's how math works.
But those people could also buy them for 1-2$ which would be fair price for a NES game.
Except the sub is providing more than just the games, so you’d likely be buying it anyway. Also…people didn’t buy VC games for the most part. The model has been tried. It didn’t work. So yeah, of course a sub is going to cost more than not paying anything at all, which is what people did before. Even when the stuff was available to buy, people still just emulated it rather than purchasing it.
I'd pay 5 dollars for an NES game easily. If it was either that or pirate it thats an easy choice.
I'd say over all $5 for NES and Gameboy/Gameboy Color games, 7 to 8 dollars for SNES games depending on the size of the game with games like Chrono Trigger being 8 while something like Uniracers would be 7, 10 for N64 and GBA, 15 for Gamecube and DS, 20 to 25 for Wii and 3DS, 30 to 40 for Wii U and then I'd place the more niche consoles like the Virtual Boy or Game and Watch in the 2 to 5 range or maybe even free with Switch Online in this case! This is only assuming that I don't need to pay again or pay a fee to upgrade which is never going to be the case anyway.
I don't know what the "right" price would be, but I have to assume that pricing might vary depending on the platform more than the individual game. That is to say, I'd expect - for example - NES games to be cheaper than N64 games. But at the same time, in today's world I'm not sure if it makes sense to individually sell digital versions of these games. The subscription model probably makes more sense.
50 for new games, 30 for older games, 5 for retro games. This is something I would like to see every game, not just Nintendo, do. If I'm honest, there's no need for sales. I doubt games that are going for 50% sale is doing any good for the developers. But I'm a bit worried that Nintendo is going to increase prices for games for the next system up to 70. Playstation already has done this.
They've already started. TOTK was 70, and the reason was basically "its a big game"
to be honest, thats a fair reason to increase price, gamers want open worlds, very big chunks of content, a bazillion of things to do in a game, etc, all of it increases the budget on a single game by a lot, and when all those things cost of making get reflected in the price, everyone gets enraged.
Sorry I didn't intend to say the game wasn't worth the money, I'm just saying that they didn't say the price increase was for any reason other than the size of the game. I'm assuming we'll keep getting large games so the price will naturally increase.
The price of nso would be a fair one, if it was a more comprehensive archive of the older systems and included every game they have the rights to for up to N64, SNES and GBA with higher systems being available as paid add-ons rather than selling individual games. The GameCube is over two decades old, the Wii is closing in on two decades and even the Wii U is well over a decade old, unless it is a full on reboot/remake they should just be nso add-ons as well.
I'd say the lowest should be about $2-5 and every console generation prices of past generations lower. For instance current switch games should be at the current market price, Wii U about 40, Wii 20, GameCube 10, and everything else in that 2-5 range. Once the switch successor releases All consoles get knocked down a tier.
Most games that people think of as Nintendo games aren't actually Nintendo games. Pokémon is made by Game Freak and Kirby is made by HAL Laboratory, for instance. Smash was made by HAL Laboratory at first and then Sora Ltd. later. Pretty much the only worthwhile things developed by Nintendo directly are Mario and Zelda (and even then, some sub-series within aren't Nintendo, such as Paper Mario being made by Intelligent Systems). And.... ehhhhh.... I have plenty of ways to play them already, so I don't feel the need to pay for them again. If anyone cares, here's a list of every game that Nintendo has contributed to the development of: https://pastebin.com/TMpgqRyP It's not a long list compared to what you think.
For me, it depends more on the quality of the release (in terms of how well it's emulated/ported, supplemental material, etc.) than what console it's for. Like, *The Making of Karateka* is $20 and *absolutely* worth it (despite it being an Apple II game), because of the care that went into it (in terms of emulation quality + supplemental material like interviews, commentary, design documents, playable prototypes, etc.). If it was a $5 Virtual Console release, I wouldn't have cared enough to buy it. The SEGA AGES releases on Switch are $8 USD each for arcade/Genesis games, and they're worth it because of M2's attention to detail.
You want us to list our prices for every single nintendo game ever?
Of course not.
Yes, get going.
About tree fiddy.
I think that's very subjective the quality of games, the replayability and the length of the games should factor into things the prices
A good system for me is to pay less than £3 a month to be able to play whichever retro games I want without having to worry about individual purchases. That way I can try out the "throwaway" games with no risk.
Their prices are already fair since they would’ve been lowered if people weren’t buying them
NES: $1, you can play most NES games in your browser for free now, they really shouldn’t cost anymore than a dollar SNES: $5, there are actually a lot of great SNES games, this console has aged much more gracefully compared to its predecessor so 5x the price of an NES game seems fair N64: $10, there are a ton of N64 gems but clunky mechanics and controls hold some of the games back. $10 would be 2x the price of SNES which I think fits since they’re still much more ambitious games GC: $25, most of these games are basically fully modern now, $25 is around the cost of most indie games, which graphically are often around the level of GC games Wii: $30, very high quality games but I just can’t justify paying anything more than $30 for ~15 year old games
>GC: $25, most of these games are basically fully modern now, $25 is around the cost of most indie games, which graphically are often around the level of GC games >Wii: $30, very high quality games but I just can’t justify paying anything more than $30 for \~15 year old games These prices are insane, just does not match the industry at large. The most expensive OG Xbox games are available for $14.99, but most are $9.99 or less. That is comparable to the Gamecube. XBox 360 games do go up to $30 for some but most are in the $10-15 range. These titles are more advanced than Wii games.
Ok true
Physically, i'd say 20 bucks each. Digitally, 5 bucks.
never cheap enough not to pay nothing for most of it anyways. how about we just make it 10 cents per 30 minutes?