The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid. It's amusing to consider I was sitting there playing NES games inside a GameCube game rather than playing the GameCube game itself.
Maybe it's licensing or something, but the fact that Nintendo doesn't simply have its entire catalogue available via virtual console is a real shame. The passionate console hacking/reverse engineering community has managed to make near-perfect emulators for everything up to the Wii, and pretty good support for the Switch. Accessing this takes only a few minutes to accomplish on the high seas, but somehow Nintendo takes years to add a few games to their own service.
nemomarx · 1h ago
Nintendo is more likely than most publishers to delay releases to avoid competing with themselves. Their new virtual console strategy is a slow drip feed that won't distract from their main titles or impact sales at all, so a subscription fee.
If they every have a badly selling console like the Wii u again expect them to ramp up emulators to look generous and add a lot of value quickly.
nkrisc · 29m ago
Is the market for Nintendo games really so small that decades-old titles will meaningfully compete with their current ones? Surely the demand for SMB must be minuscule compared to the demand for their modern games among consumers?
Is Breath of the Wild really going to lose sales to Legend of Zelda? Are there really consumers who will only buy one or the other?
nemomarx · 1m ago
Not to NES games, but it might distract from news about it (minor effect on sales) and their emulation catalogue is now up to GameCube games. So the question is whether a five or ten dollar copy of wind Waker could distract from an 80 dollar tears of the kingdom.
They also have more marginal games - captain toad or whatever - sold at the same price as their big titles. Those seem pretty vulnerable imo.
0points · 1h ago
> The NES games inside Animal Crossing blew my mind as a kid.
The nesticle emulator blew my mind as a kid.
thrance · 17m ago
Yup, they're sitting on millions of hours of work because of some nefarious business logic. Probably they determined that making old games available would negatively impact the sales of their new products, at least enough to be a problem. Whatever the reason, a shame.
maxlin · 10m ago
Cool video! I do wonder though, how much cases there were those arbitrary compatibility quirks being sacrificed for performance. I could imagine a shoddy job trying to support everything axing performance.
Maybe it's licensing or something, but the fact that Nintendo doesn't simply have its entire catalogue available via virtual console is a real shame. The passionate console hacking/reverse engineering community has managed to make near-perfect emulators for everything up to the Wii, and pretty good support for the Switch. Accessing this takes only a few minutes to accomplish on the high seas, but somehow Nintendo takes years to add a few games to their own service.
If they every have a badly selling console like the Wii u again expect them to ramp up emulators to look generous and add a lot of value quickly.
Is Breath of the Wild really going to lose sales to Legend of Zelda? Are there really consumers who will only buy one or the other?
They also have more marginal games - captain toad or whatever - sold at the same price as their big titles. Those seem pretty vulnerable imo.
The nesticle emulator blew my mind as a kid.