There had been some speculation on Reddit that it was a run of near-obsolete hardware proposed by one of their partners. Some teardown (I can't find a source now) found out that it was shipping with already EOL'ed components that weren't available for back-order from the fabs.<p>If anyone has more information than my 3rd hand comment, I'd be super interested. I was very disappointed not to find one for sale for a reasonable price. I would have loved one.
How disappointing. I was hoping Nintendo was taking a lesson from Steam: if you make it stupid easy to pay and play games then people will pay for them. NES Classic was a way to, legally, play a whole bunch of old Nintendo games without resorting to cheap emulators and pirated games that many, many gamers resort to.<p>I'm hoping they're going to re-release this in the near future or something similar that is at a similar price point but let's you play a back catalog of NES, SNES and N64 games. If they had a legal way for me to do that I would pick it up in a heart beat.<p>I guess the alternative is offering all these classic games on the Switch but is the target audience really the same? A $300 handheld versus a $60 dedicated classic TV console?<p>I also wonder if Nintendo could destroy the market of cheap / gimmicky consoles that you can buy for like $50 that include "150 games!". Release something that anyone can afford, hook it up to an e-store and let game devs release cheap games on it. It would be like hooking up the N64 / SNES / NES consoles with online services.<p>I think I rambled a little bit but hopefully it made sense.
This is absolutely ridiculous, if they just supplied it correctly (something I was hoping they would learn to do by now) this thing would literally be free money for Nintendo. Or that's what it seems like to me - I know I would have at least bought one if it was available for the holiday season. How do they always underestimate the supply that they need?
Arrgh! I saw several of these sitting on the counter of a Gamestop just last week, but instead decided 'No, I was just able to get two Switch consoles. That's enough for today. I'll grab one of those in a week or two."<p>Now with this sudden announcement, no doubt those have vanished and I won't see one again without paying as much as a Switch ($300+) for one. Thanks, Nintendo. You're really listening to your fans here.
Discontinued despite never making it to Amazon or even the Nintendo store in the UK for retail price after the preorder! I'm guessing Nintendo isn't too bothered by people using emulators if they're withdrawing paid alternatives like this.
Don't worry! It's very easy to build a RetroPie box!<p>* RetroPie - Retro-gaming on the Raspberry Pi || <a href="https://retropie.org.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://retropie.org.uk/</a>
While sad, there are good emulators for the NES/Famicom. With a proper display and a controller you may not notice a substantial difference.<p>Now, while emulators are legal, ROMs may not. I wish Nintendo and others could release a desktop version of their legacy games shop.<p>I understand their business is "software sells hardware", but in the case of legacy games they could bring more revenue if they were a bit more open.
I figured they would actually have to start producing something in order to "discontinue" it though? /s<p>Have yet to see stock anywhere except through scalpers. Nintendo continues to have a huge supply problem with basic availability of hardware, for whatever reason.<p>Would buy one in a heartbeat. Not going to reward a scumbag scalper by spending a penny over MSRP to do so though.
In my opinion, Nintendo should release a FPGA-based NES/SNES, with low latency joypads, and perfect audio and video (including advanced filters for "clean" and "perfectly distorted" experience). That, plus a "market" so they can ensure profits, would be huge, both for them, and for the users.
I got lucky and was able to get a pre-order of the initial batch. However, I didn't get a second controller which now seems very foolish. Looking around it seems that $30 is as cheap as I can expect to find one.
I didn't buy the NES Classic Edition (not interested in living room consoles), but it would be an instabuy if Nintendo made another run of the Gameboy with 30 good games for ~$50.
I'm sure a lot of people are going to recommend RetroPie and other emulation packages. I'm going to recommend against general-purpose emulation if you enjoy the games in question:
<a href="https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/2019/an-input-lag-investigation/2" rel="nofollow">https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/2019/an-input-lag-invest...</a>
I'm just gonna put this out there with no citations or proof: this controller[0] had the best hand feel of any console controller ever.<p>[0]<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Nintendo-Entertainment-System-NES-Controller-FL.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Nintendo...</a>