I think that when NSO eventually gets a price hike, this would be the plaster on the wound.

Because the six FF games you are referencing arent just ports from their original releases.

They'll either release the original games on NSO and the remakes of the older generations as separate releases like they did with 1st and 2nd gen games on 3DS.

@OT - Nice, I'm glad its not 10th gen or remakes of 5th gen. I'll take this.

I saw where Pokemon Leaker Riddler Khu made a tease that their could be a Pokemon game this year afterall. Some think it could be an ILCA developed Gen 5 remake, hard to say. Odd that they wouldn't announce it today if it's in development though, unless they are saving it for a 2nd Pokemon Presents later in the year. 

That's why I put "for free" on quote. Also, I'm willing to bet that most people interested in playing old Pokémon games and have a Nintendo Switch already have a NSO subscription in order to play the newer Pokémon games online. I don't think putting Gen 1-3 on NSO (and Gen 3 would be locked behind a second paywall) would attract too many new customers. It would be much, much more profitable to just sell them.

The Final Fantasy games was just an example. Sure, they have remastered music and... remastered sprites? I don't think that's quite the word, but whathever. My point is they are still old games sold on nostalgia at a very expensive price (especially the physical release).

If Square Enix was very successful withthat approach with a series much less popular than Pokémon... I think the course of action is very clear. They could follow suit and basically sell Gen 1-3 at 80 dolars with close to zero developement costs and obtain ridiculous amounts of money from the tens of milions sales they would make. 

Or they could put them on NSO, which most of their Pokémon fans already have and make significantly less money.

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Doesnt matter if they are old games, people can complain about Square Enix as much as they want, but at least they give more effort in their remasters and remakes unlike GameFreak who simply ported straight from Game Boy to 3DS identical copies of games.

Its not just remastered music and sprites

QoL features like Boosters which can alter experience gain, money gain and to turn off encounters is or a detailed map (which the original versions never had) which showed treasure chests and paths is a game changer and a great way to entice people who never played the older games or the series at all - great way to start the series too since you can customize your own difficulty when it comes grinding.

There's all sorts of other stuff they did which pretty much makes playing the NES and SNES originals (and the PS1 versions) pointless to go back and play again.

https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_version_differences#Final_Fantasy_pixel_remaster_series

Anyways to go with sales and prices..

Whether the Pixel Remasters was a success is unknown because SE tends to make their expectations unreasonable - they sold a total of 3 million units between 6 games between the Switch, PS4, PC/Steam and iOS/android versions as of September 2023. They havent had any press release since.

https://www.gematsu.com/2023/09/final-fantasy-pixel-remaster-series-sales-top-three-million

Another thing to consider is the fact that you can buy the games separately so not everyone "Paid $80" - the entire collection goes for $75 , has been on sale once for $60.

Individually - Final Fantasy I PR and Final Fantasy II PR are $12 each ($9 when on sale) and III PR, IV PR, V PR and VI PR are all $18 each ($14 when on sale)

I would guess that III PR (because its the only 2D Remake of III), IV PR and VI PR are the ones that sold the most between the six games.

https://www.dekudeals.com/items/final-fantasy-i-vi-pixel-remaster-collection

Compare to your claim that Gen 1-3 for $80 would sell for millions....if it were true, they would have done it a long time ago - clearly there's a reason why they have not.

Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow sold 1.5 mil copies (across 4 versions, 3 in WW and 4 in Japan) - the only known figure since its release. The games were being sold for $10 each on the 3DS back in 2016 (this was before the Switch existed and the 3DS had a high user count - also the games never went on sale unless you were lucky to find a physical retailer who sold them for less like Best Buy did for $7 each.)

https://www.ign.com/articles/2016/04/28/pokemon-re-releases-sold-over-15-million-worldwide

I cant find numbers for Pokemon Gold, Silver or Crystal's 3DS re-release anywhere so I'm assuming it flopped in comparison and which is the reason why they stopped making re-releases of the older games.

So either they'll release it on NSO as a way to entice people to join NSO (and to get people who unsubscribed to NSO to come back) or they wont do anything with older versions of games and just focus on mainline games, spinoffs and remakes like they been doing for the past decade.

I won't necesarrily disagree that it would be more profitable to sell them (there are other advantages to pushing NSO though), but I'm 100 % certain it would bring in a ton of new people. It's quite a stretch to think everyone with an interest in classic Pokémon still plays the modern games and has NSO to do so, particularly with the bad rep the new games have gotten. It's mainly the more dedicated players that fit that bill and this is a series that has an absolutely massive casual audience as well that get sucked into it every few years.

Just to note, Puzzle League is already available on NSO.

I still would like to see the Gen3 games on there eventually, or preferably available standalone but...

I know. You kinda repeated what I said lol. Bummer we didn't get anything. I was about to lose my mind when the Unown appeared and I saw what appeared to be a Game Boy era Game Freak logo lol, but that didn't turn out to be the case. 

We'll be lucky if we ever get a mainline Pokémon game on NSO at this point. Here's to hoping Nintendo is holding on to that for the launch of the Switch 2!