Pemalite said:
potato_hamster said:
Perhaps there is a market for it, but I strongly doubt it. Let's say Nintendo didn't want to throw money away and decided to produce millions more NES classics at launch, kept producing them until they started showing up at Bed, Bath and Beyond, and then shut down production at 10 million units instead of the 2ish they did. After all that. they then eventually all sold out after being readily available on store shelves for months. No one would be willing to spend $200 on one. I think the price people are willing to pay for it has more to do with the lack of availability and exlcusivity of owning one, much like the people that are willing to pay $500 for a Nintendo Switch today, or the people willing to spend over $1000 on a PS4 at launch.
Yet, no sane person is looking at eBay prices for Nintendo Switches and saying "I think Nintendo should make a $500 console, and Sony should make a $1000 PS4, there's clearly a market for it".
Don't forget Atari flashback and Sega genesis/megadrive retro consoles from the likes of At Games. Neither of these were made in nearly as high of quantities as the NES Classic, aren't sold out everywhere, and aren't going for 3-4 times the asking price on eBay, even when the latter upscales, and has a genesis/megadrive cartridge slot. The NES Classic is unique.
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Some good points.
As for the NES Classic being unique... It actually isn't. The SNES classic is replicating the NES classics precedent. It sold out in a couple days that it was on pre-order here in Australia.
The AT Games consoles weren't really advertised too well either... Plus they have technical issues, such as sub-par sound... No HDMI in an era where some TV's ONLY come with HDMI... Shit wireless controllers... List goes on.
The new Atari Flashback 8 and Genesis/Mega Drive consoles seem to be ditching their old emulation platform, so I am keen to see how well they do. (I've got mine pre-ordered along with the SNES classic and soon Xbox One X.)
But I don't expect them to be NES Classic or SNES Classic-like success stories though. Nintendo's classic consoles are riding the wave of nostalgia and social media virality, that is a hard thing to match...
The only other company that could match that kind of brand awareness is Sony, heck take a look at Crash, the sales on that game went bonkers.
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I think you're making an assumption about the SNES classic. If Nintendo is actually making "signficantly more" SNES classics to a point where they're readily available on store shelves in the weeks following launch (aka keeping up with demand), you're not going to see people buying them from ebay for 2--3 times the prices. That's a big if, though.
But fair enough about the flashback and At Games megadrive, but it appears we both agree you're not going to see people willing to pay 2-3 times retail prices for these consoles when they are released, even if they're at the NES classic level of quality.
At the end of the day, I just don't see a reason why Sony would bother making a console that plays PS1 discs and memory cards, has PSN connectivity, or has a better upscaler than their existing solutions in the PS3 or Vita. I just don't see that being critical to the popularity of such a device at all. It would be far far easier and cheaper to just make a box that plays digital copies of a few dozen included games, and maybe supports copying your digital PS1 games you purchased from the PSN to a USB drive that it can play.
