Slashdot Mirror
Pricing For Retro Games on the Wii
schnikies79 writes to mention an Ars Technica article revealing the pricing scheme for retro content on the Wii. From the article: "Iwata revealed that games for Nintendo's "virtual console" that will allow Wii owners to play old titles on their consoles will be priced at ¥500 and ¥1,000, roughly US$4.50 to US$8.99. For reference, classic retro games for the Nintendo GameBoy sold for upwards of US$35 for some titles, US$19.99 for others. Uptake was understandably low, as gamers were reticent to pay that much for old content." The piece goes on to say that they're ramping up DS production to meet command, and that connectivity with the DS will be a major selling point for the console when it releases.
Considering some of the outlandish pricing for cell phone games (which are choppy and short in comparison to console games), this really doesn't sound all that bad.
I have to say, nintendo is serious about taking a chunk out of both MS and Sony in this round. They are getting my money, that much I can tell you. Just for the zelda titles alone.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Sega and Hudson (makers of the Turbo Graphics 16) have both signed up with Nintendo to offer classic games on the Wii.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
And the ability to play PS One games will be the major selling point of a $800 console. You can buy a PS One for $15.
Nintendo offers several different consoles in one. Not sure how many but 6 or more I think. Sony can bundle three, well, four if you count PSP in (but most PSP games are just ports/remakes of PS2 titles anyway).
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Exactly. $4.50 for an NES rom, which are extremely small, 256kB for the fancier NES games, is too much. I've tried hooking up the old NES for some nostalgia over the years, and inevitably get bored with the simplistic play in short time. Very few games are playable for a length of time, Super Mario Bros 3 being one. On the other hand, a monthly subscription with unlimited play would have sold me in a heartbeat.
Also if the machine dies (rare, given that my NES is still working 18 years later) do you lose your library? My wife's cell phone recently broke (1 year warranty, 14 month old phone, happened 2 years ago with the previous phone as well). She's out the handful of games she downloaded (Burgertime, pacman, etc at $6 a piece).
An old PC with an emulator going to the TV is going to be just as fun.
Nintendo has some up-front costs for setting up the service, and some minimal costs to keep it running. Basically, they're sending you free bits (for them) for your money. And you're glad to pay it.
Hell, yeah. I think the Wii's probably going to be the only game console that I'll actually buy new.
But what I'd really love to see is the ability to have the Wii run homebrew games under emulation. Consoles these days are so powerful that even the previous generation of console is powerful enough for most purposes. Remember the N64? Pretty sucky processing power by today's standards, but you got some damn good games for it.
By allowing people to upload and run their own game images on the Wii, for, say the SNES or the N64, they'll make the device an absolute dream come true to the (legitimate) emulation crowd. This would gain them huge mindshare with very little effort, while at the same time allowing them to keep control over the Wii running in native mode. It would be very easy to do; you'd need a system for loading in image from a USB device, and that's pretty much it. There would be a minor technical problem in making it so that people can't run copied commercial ROM images --- or they'll undermine their own retro game market --- but that's probably not hard (just rearrange th emulated hardware so the homebrew emulated machine wasn't compatible with the genuine original, for example).
(If they were willing to spend a bit more effort, they could come up with a sandboxed environment that allowed you to use a few more of the Wii's features; this would allow homebrew games similar to, say, the XBox Live range. But of course, that would involve significantly more work.)
Now we know that they are actually editing and not just using copy and paste.
interesting.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg