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Nintendo To Sell Old Consoles To China?
drfishy writes "An interview with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata on IGN hints at the possibility of Nintendo entering the Chinese market with their products soon. The most curious part of the interview is that Satoru Iwata says Nintendo is considering releasing older generation hardware to combat piracy, could this mean the big N is going to start making Super Nintendos again? Will there be new games? How would this fight piracy?"
By re-releasing older consoles, Nintendo can shutdown ROM piracy by claiming that the games are actively on the market.
If Nintendo starts manufacturing old hardware again that will mess up the prices of used games in a big way. I we at the mall days ago and they has NESs for 40 bucks, SNES for 30 and N64s for an amount I forget, but cheap. They might have been cheaper than the NESs I dont' remember so well. Bit it was messed up! We've got like 3 NESs in the house. Well actually 1 physically here. I own one that is far away. We won one at a duck hunt tournament (people SUCK at duck hunt!) and my roomate's got one. We gave one to his brother.
Oh yeah, that's another thing. At that very same duck hunt tournament there was a guy who was collecting Mario/Duck Hunt cartridges. He had so many he made a suit of armor out of them. However, he performed very poorly compared to us in the tourney. Apparently he collected so many that the price went from 15 cents to 95 cents a cart in his time. If nintendo manufactures more old Nintendo stuff wont that not work. I mean people can get carts for 95 cents they aren't going to pay more than that. And making more supply just lowers prices.
I'm fairly certain Nintendo will only be manufacturing N64 stuff if anything. They aren't that stupid.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
This might be a little off-topic, but I got to thinking (uh oh):
Assuming that Nintendo (or anyone else for that matter) re-released an old console & games, what kind of editing would be necessary to make a game fit the culture?
Take for example, the classic NES games Rush N' Attack (say it out loud) and Contra. Those were clearly marketed toward the anti-communism sentiment prevalent in the US in the 80's. How would the Chinese take to that?
Or even something say like GTA3... which very vividly portrays a modern western society (scary thought). For the most part, that's stuff we believe the Chinese can only dream of. What would they think of it? How about games like Wall Street Kid ?
For that matter, what kind of Chinese-only games are there? Damn, I wish I knew more about the culture... I'm sure they would have games that are pure fun in context to them, but would have no chance of being appreciated over here.
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"The slave thinks he is released from bondage, only to find a stronger set of chains" - NIN
[quote]
"Given that many Chinese probably do not even have televisions..."
Did you pull that one out of your ass?
China has roughly 300 million televisions. The US has around 215 million.
[/quote]
China has 1.5 billion people, the US has 300 million. I beleve he's accurate
"Remember, any tool can be the right tool." -- Red Green
How's this justification for you: I like the products but I don't like giving up money. So I won't, unless I like the product so much that I want to finance future development of similar products from the same people.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"The most curious part of the interview is that Satoru Iwata says Nintendo is considering releasing older generation hardware to combat piracy, could this mean the big N is going to start making Super Nintendos again? Will there be new games?"
Who cares if there will be new games? The very concept of putting NES and SNES hardware and software back on the assembly line is teriffic news as far as I'm concerned!
Nintendo retired these consoles because they had reached the point where their sales didn't justify the cost of manufacturing them any more. But now we have the possibility of introducing these systems to a new, relatively untouched market. A market that may very well fund the continued manufacture of these consoles and cartridges. The NES and SNES markets will (with any luck) be self-sufficient again. Especially when you consider the advances in both hardware and manufacturing in the past decade or so (ie. they're cheaper to make than ever).
And if the cost of manufacturing the older consoles is being justified by the Chinese market, what could they possibly have to lose if they, say, start selling them in North America again? I'd finally be able to have my very own copy of EarthBound!
(WaReZ kiddies: No, ZSNES is not the same. It lets me play the games I wish I had, but I still wish I had them. If you can't understand the difference, I truly pity you.)
(Moral self-righteous twits: No, I will not mortgage my first-born on eBay for a used copy of the game. Nintendo makes no money off the sale of used cartridges. I'll buy it when Nintendo re-releases it.)
Release them here. And get Sega on board - man, I would have killed to have been able to play Warsong on my actual Genesis.
.iso through paid download.
This is a question I've long had for console makers: Why not create an emulator, package a shitload of games on the same disc as it, and sell it? Hell - you could even offer the
Sure, just like music and movies - there are people who simply wouldn't pay for it.
There's also a lot of people who would. I'll admit, I've downloaded games whose cartridges I don't own. The problem is - I couldn't find those cartridges back in the day. They're impossible to find now.
I have a hard time finding decent Sega CD and Saturn hardware. The games? Well, they're few and far between, aside from the massively craptastic ones. If used game places have a *good* game in stock, they'll have jacked the price up to the point where it's higher than it was when the game was new!
That's just Sega CD. If you look for anything earlier than that, good fscking luck. You're reliant on dodging e-bay fraud and looking in the local paper's classified section.
Selling an emulator and roms would be quite easy for game manufacturers. Hell - look at the lack of cost! No packaging, no cartridge/disc, no printed instruction manual.. Distribution? Toss it on a website and let it cook.
Now, of course, there might be legal issues with distributing games created by another company. (See all those wonderful licensing blurbs on all console games.) However, I think the console manufacturers could throw enough weight around to get game manufacturers to join on the bandwagon if they wanted to.
You probably believe Palladium is designed to protect your privacy and security, too...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You are right, they already sell these consoles. But I do think they are not legally for sale here. I don't think they are officially approved by Chinese government yet. I could be wrong though.
Also, I was told that they will offer to "mod" it or they come "modded"
Aside from that, the prices at which they are selling for is quite high (kinda low compared to retail in US, but still high for an average Chinese citizen). Companies like Nintendo would probably have to enter the market with lower end systems that will match their spending quota. If they enter with current systems, the price will be too high, forcing them to drop prices in China. Then you get companies outside of CHina importing these units and sell at a cheaper price, hence creating a downward price spiral.
I was there a bit before, I also did see some weird looking consoles that play games similar to SNES games.