Pricing For Retro Games on the Wii

schnikies79 writes to mention an Ars Technica article revealing the pricing scheme for retro content on the Wii. From the article: "Iwata revealed that games for Nintendo's "virtual console" that will allow Wii owners to play old titles on their consoles will be priced at ¥500 and ¥1,000, roughly US$4.50 to US$8.99. For reference, classic retro games for the Nintendo GameBoy sold for upwards of US$35 for some titles, US$19.99 for others. Uptake was understandably low, as gamers were reticent to pay that much for old content." The piece goes on to say that they're ramping up DS production to meet command, and that connectivity with the DS will be a major selling point for the console when it releases.

Sounds Fair

[kubevubin]

Considering some of the outlandish pricing for cell phone games (which are choppy and short in comparison to console games), this really doesn't sound all that bad.

Mario Kart 64

[mastergoon]

Anyone else addicted to this game? In my opinion its one of the most well made games of all time. For something so simple, theres so much to it. Any word if it will be available? It would be awesome if we could play Mario Kart online...it is possible with emulators but it is really laggy and not a whole lot of fun.

Color me impressed

[grasshoppa]

I have to say, nintendo is serious about taking a chunk out of both MS and Sony in this round. They are getting my money, that much I can tell you. Just for the zelda titles alone.

Mistranslated?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article should say new games developed just for the virtual console will be between 500 and 1000 yen? Not the classic games that the virtual console will also offer?

With that kind of pricing....

[MindPrison]

...we'd be better off with those retro-5-in-one joysticks that already come with classic arcade games that you now can pick up for 5 dollars - Hardware and games included + approval from the original companies.

Ya got to do better than that Nintendo.

I was *so* right

[JoshWurzel]

My brother and I were having a discussion about this the other. He was convinced that Nintendo wouldn't be able to sell their old games at more than a couple bucks a piece. I thought 5-10 seemed reasonable. My brother, 18, didn't understand that there are millions of mid-20's people who grew up on these games and have plenty of disposable income. As I have already purchased Zelda III and original Metroid for my game boy advance, I knew better.

This is going to be a gold mine for them.

Re:Mario Kart 64

[Headcase88]

It would be awesome if we could play Mario Kart online

you might be in luck. Nintendo has said that they plan to make some of their old titles online (citing Mario Party as an example). Beyond that, hopefully the GC emulator will trick LAN-enabled games into running online (thinking it's running on a LAN), so that would cover Double Dash(!!) as well as Kirby Air Ride. Plus I guess Phantasy Star Online will run online on the Wii.

But what I really want online is Super Mario All Stars --> Super Mario Bros 3 --> Battle Game, with at least the option to turn off coins. (This Battle Game is my favourite version of Classic Mario Bros, you might know it better from the Mario GBA games, but I don't like that version quite as much).

Re:Sony... Microsoft...

[AuMatar]

Sega and Hudson (makers of the Turbo Graphics 16) have both signed up with Nintendo to offer classic games on the Wii.

Re:$5 is more than fair

[Sylver Dragon]

Same here. I grew up with a NES and SNES in the house, and bought the N64 with money from my first job. There are plenty of titles I missed because of a lack of disposable income. I was fairly active in renting games, and had plenty I started but never got to finish, and would love to have a chance to go back and play some of them again. While I realize that some games are far better through the rose colored glasses of nostolgia, there are still a number of gems that stand the test of time. Just recently, because of the information on the new Super Smash Bros. having Pit from Kid Icarus, I went back and played through Kid Icarus again. Yep, it's 8-bit pallete shifting goodness, just like I remember; still worth playing. Hell, I even pulled out graph paper to map out the castles again, I've long since lost the ones my brother and I made years ago.
My next retro project, the Original Fallout, followed by 2 and 3. Borrowed off a friend who's been mentioning them as some of the best games of all time. As far as I have seen of the first one, he is right. Might have to go back and play through Wasteland again, just for completness.

Re:Sony... Microsoft...

[Vo0k]

And the ability to play PS One games will be the major selling point of a $800 console. You can buy a PS One for $15.

Nintendo offers several different consoles in one. Not sure how many but 6 or more I think. Sony can bundle three, well, four if you count PSP in (but most PSP games are just ports/remakes of PS2 titles anyway).

Re:Sony... Microsoft...

[Vo0k]

Still about the hardest to download would be NES Doom port :)
The cartridge contained a GPU that produced the 3D gfx the poor NES CPU was not capable of producing. Download THAT!

Re:Have you read the summary?

[whoop]

Exactly. $4.50 for an NES rom, which are extremely small, 256kB for the fancier NES games, is too much. I've tried hooking up the old NES for some nostalgia over the years, and inevitably get bored with the simplistic play in short time. Very few games are playable for a length of time, Super Mario Bros 3 being one. On the other hand, a monthly subscription with unlimited play would have sold me in a heartbeat.

Also if the machine dies (rare, given that my NES is still working 18 years later) do you lose your library? My wife's cell phone recently broke (1 year warranty, 14 month old phone, happened 2 years ago with the previous phone as well). She's out the handful of games she downloaded (Burgertime, pacman, etc at $6 a piece).

An old PC with an emulator going to the TV is going to be just as fun.

Re:$5 is more than fair

[david.given]

Nintendo has some up-front costs for setting up the service, and some minimal costs to keep it running. Basically, they're sending you free bits (for them) for your money. And you're glad to pay it.

Hell, yeah. I think the Wii's probably going to be the only game console that I'll actually buy new.

But what I'd really love to see is the ability to have the Wii run homebrew games under emulation. Consoles these days are so powerful that even the previous generation of console is powerful enough for most purposes. Remember the N64? Pretty sucky processing power by today's standards, but you got some damn good games for it.

By allowing people to upload and run their own game images on the Wii, for, say the SNES or the N64, they'll make the device an absolute dream come true to the (legitimate) emulation crowd. This would gain them huge mindshare with very little effort, while at the same time allowing them to keep control over the Wii running in native mode. It would be very easy to do; you'd need a system for loading in image from a USB device, and that's pretty much it. There would be a minor technical problem in making it so that people can't run copied commercial ROM images --- or they'll undermine their own retro game market --- but that's probably not hard (just rearrange th emulated hardware so the homebrew emulated machine wasn't compatible with the genuine original, for example).

(If they were willing to spend a bit more effort, they could come up with a sandboxed environment that allowed you to use a few more of the Wii's features; this would allow homebrew games similar to, say, the XBox Live range. But of course, that would involve significantly more work.)

Re:editors did it, not me

[AvitarX]

Now we know that they are actually editing and not just using copy and paste.

interesting.

Re:Sony... Microsoft...

[Firehed]

No kidding. I've got the entire NES and SNES library of games (or a huge chunk anyways, quite a few hundred) backed up on two CDs. And to think, that would be probably a U-Haul trailer full of cartridges.

I think this has finally convinced me to buy a Wii, at least pending the price of the system itself. I knew it would be the one console I got, if any, of the new three, but being almost exclusively a PC gamer (and I don't even game too much anymore), I wasn't especially inclined to get any of the set. A tiny little inexpensive thing of a system, coupled with cheap games that are fun to play, and what looks to be the craziest thing to ever happen to controllers. What more could I want? I seem to remember hearing that they'd be releasing some (if not all) Sega games as well, too, and having grown up with Sonic rather than Mario, I don't think I could possibly go wrong.

Congratulations, Nintendo, on winning The Console War of 2006.