| Dulfite said: I'm curious what their profits are on this device taking the free games, two controllers, and the device itself into consideration. I'm sure they are profitting less on this than they would be on selling a game for $60, right? |
Actually, I would imagine that they are profiting more than they would on a game.
Of course the NES Classic is more expensive to make than an actual game, but the price of the games is in the development, and not in the materials.
Nintendo already had emulators available for the NES, and they probably just had to do slight adjustments to optimize it. I would be surprised if the R&D budget reached a million dollars. The games cost virtually nothing. You could argue that they're forsaking future sales, but these games have been available as paid downloads for 10 years or so, so most people who wanted to download them likely would have.
A game's development budget varies. Nintendo's are on the cheaper side, but you gotta figure the budgets are still between 5-10 million at a minimum. Probably much more than it cost for R&D on Nintendo Classic.
I'm not an expert, but I think after factoring in R&D, they're making significantly more per unit than off of a game.
