I think this is awesome, and I wish Nintendo would do it too, but I was hoping for an Emulator style application, a single app, where new games can be added as they come out. Being separate apps, it's fine, but it's going to make it a PITA when you have over 100 games you'd love to play. Thank god for iOS searching.
Nintendo is clearly motivated by something other than profit. They release the NES Classic Mini, a license to print money if there ever was one, and it's impossible to buy one without hammering Walmart's private APIs with a script. Then, after a little over one season, they cancel the product entirely.
Perhaps Nintendo feeds on nostalgia brainwaves or something.
I've started to think that Nintendo's goal is survival, not profit. This is different than most American companies, and perhaps most companies in general. Profit and survival are, of course, related, but different things. First, I mean survival as-is, not just survival as a legal entity. So that means not laying off employees to survive. When the goal is survival, the risk-reward calculations may be different when you've got enough profit. It may mean not exploiting a cash-cow as aggressively as possible because after a certain point, the risk of over-extending yourself becomes non-trivial, and the extra profit is just racking up the score.
"I think we could have done a better job communicating that was gonna be a limited run," Scibetta told Ars. "It was supposed to be for that holiday. We extended it actually because demand was so much, then we stopped producing it."
Nintendo doesn't know how to run a business. They know how to make games.
It's a shame. Because, as you said, they could effectively print as much money as they wanted with a long-term production run of the NES classic and the obvious sequels for SNES, N64, and Game Boy.
It seems a little backwards though right? Imagine if they offered a Netflix-style service (or akin to PlayStation Plus).
They could grant access to their back catalog for something like $10/mo, and roll out segments of the back catalog over time to promote it.
Then use nostalgia-based franchise reboots and new IP (lol, but occasionally something like Splatoon catches on) to push new console sales and then slowly phase-out back-catalog support from older consoles.
You could time the phase-out with a holiday season 2 years into a new console (aligns with discounts and once initial new console buzz wears out).
Seems like a much more predictable revenue stream than hinging on the success of a new console.
You could also create leaderboards and niche competitions for the hardcore audience (Super Mario Maker has a sizable hardcore following).
Would you pay a subscription for access to the old games? Ad revenue is recurring and is probably more attractive to Sega (vs. a one time purchase fee).
The issue is that once they have your money, what is their motivation to offer updates to the game when new iOS versions come out?
This is no different from every other phone manufacturer but Apple. They have no reason to support older phones because it doesn't make them money. It does benefit Apple because they get recurring revenue from the App Store.
You might be willing to pay 20-40 bucks for a game, but the vast majority of users aren't.
I just hope this won't be weaponized to attack emulation. Many big publishers and platform owners are unhappy with proliferation of ROMs and emulators. With things like these (and according to other commenters the ads are obnoxious and emulation quality not that high) the argument can change from "emulation is SATAN, these old games for old platforms must DIE OFF" to "there is a legal way to play our games, this is piracy".
They wouldn't be totally wrong if they made that argument. Although, I personally believe that if you already own the game in one format, it's fine to use a ROM on an emulator. I'm open to other arguments though.
The thing is that ROMs and emulators on PC offer some big incentives - stuff like Launch Box, settings and shaders, raw power of the device, controller support, etc. The emulator used/bundled here is apparently inferior to even one SEGA themselves used before on older devices.
In theory the ROM sites have a disclaimer that this is archival purposes, to be downloaded by legal owners, etc. - in practice anyone can download them. But if it wasn't for these borderline illegal sites the games would D I E. Nintendo famously used an 'illegal' ROM of Mario and sold copies of it, some people speculated that they lost the original material.
Yes, I guess piracy sucks and is technically illegal but even I (and I don't play many games at all) had to download cracks for physical legal copies I owned (including once for a game published by SEGA, funnily enough).
