Less than 1 VC game per Wii, a lot of Wii owners probably have never connected the thing to the internet.

On January the numbers were 3.2 million Wiis sold, 1.4 million connected, and 1.5 million VC games downloaded.

I posted this in the site's news: http://www.vgchartz.com/news/news.php?id=274

40% of Wiis are online, and of those, an average of 1.4 Virtual Console games have been sold to each.

Virtual Console is a ripoff. 10 bucks for a Nintendo64 game, wow, I could get Halo PC for 5 bucks, much better deal than this junk.

Given Nintendo's attitude toward online, I wouldn't expect VC to be a big deal. The potential annual revenue from this is probably much less than what can be made from one AAA title. However, that's revenue that can be attained with little effort and that without the Internet would not have been available.

I do expect VC prices to drop once more Wiis are sold, and more VC games become available. That would ensure a steady and huge profit margin for Nintendo, and any developer who puts their games on the VC.

3.3 Million isn't that bad (it is similar to the number of PS3 games that have been sold worldwide) ...

I could be wrong, but I suspect that the pricing of the games has very little to do with the actual costs associated with the games and is more about producing a "value" for these games in order to encourage developers to develop games for the Virtual Console.

Hypothetically speaking, Nintendo (and the virtual-console company) could be taking a 20% cut off of the top of every game sold as a distribution/licencing fee. Now if you're a publisher you may look at the Virtual N64 and see a platform where you can develop a game for $500,000 to $1,000,000 and make $8 per title which means you only have to sell 62,500 to 125,000 copies of the game to break even; not a bad target for a downloadable game. On the other hand if each game was only $5 it would mean that they would need 125,000 to 250,000 to break even which seems like a much larger risk.

On the contrary, I think it was always a big part of their plans.  Think of the advantages:

1. More or less free revenue as the cost of putting these games up and running the servers is minimal, no physical costs to produce, etc.  Plus they are up there as long as Nintendo wants them to be and can be downloaded just the same in 2010 as in 2007.  3.3 million downloads at an average of $7 apiece is $23.1 million, and that's just in six months.

2. Attract third parties to put their games on the VC due to #1, more basically free revenue for Nintendo + more opportunities to work with third parties.

3. Big nostalgia attraction for gamers who do not have all their old systems and games available for play and who don't know about emulators or don't want to steal games online.  Possibly then a factor in system sales over time.

4. Develop new fans for older series, people who never played the original games.  Say someone never played Streets of Rage, plays it on the VC, then gets excited about a new Streets of Rage game.

Well we know Nintendo sold 1.5 million VC games in the Wii's first quarter with 3.2 million units sold.  We now know that 3.3 million VC were sold in 2 quarters with 5.84 million Wii's sold.  At that rate we could expect that Nintendo will sell between 15-20 million this year with more in each succeeding year.  That's a cool $100-150 million each year in almost pure profit which is nothing to sneeze at. 

I agree with whoever complains that the prices are high.  Not too high seeing as I've downloaded 11 games myself, but higher than what I would like ($7/5/3 for N64,SNES,NES).  I would expect as the initial cost of setting up the service are paid off and more VC games are sold to the ever growing number of Wii owners that the price will drop though.

I think the VC is great stuff and the prices are just right. $10 or less is adequate for good entertainment. Boxed platinum titles (for consoles)  are usually more expensive. If you don't enjoy vintage gaming take my advice and don't buy the games at any price. Your time is too precious for that.