I have worked for ~4 years at Nintendo in production planning and inventory management/demand forecasting. I'd just like to clarify one thing - which is repeated so frequently but just plain wrong:<p>There is no secret "scarcity" creates more demand masterplan from Nintendo.<p>- Nintendo sells to retailers (for the most part) - so any type of price gouging isn't benefiting them.<p>- Everybody at Nintendo would prefer retailers to never run out of stock. The second a retailer runs out of stock - overall customer demand drops. There is no secret evasion to other channels (which of course are also out of stock) happening.<p>- Hype effects are only _maybe_ valid for very niche core gamer titles (Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, etc.). Yes, sometimes these titles benefit a little in the beginning pulling in demand from week 2 & 3 into week 1 if presales are closed very early due to limited availability.<p>- Core gamer titles generate furious outrage on the internet, which sometimes even spills over to mainstream journalism, but are barely relevant to the bottom line compared to mass market titles (Mario, AC, Zelda of course but also titles like NintenDogs).<p>- Production Planning starts anywhere from 8 weeks to 6 months in advance of a titles release. It's damn hard to predict how well a title will sell that early on. It is even worse for HW which has lead times much, much longer.<p>- Games are shipped via air and final assembly happens in the region where they are sold. HW is shipped via boat from Asia directly. This means right about now somebody is ordering Christmas HW. How do you think the red left joy-con will sell in December? We had tricked-out time-series forecasting statistics at the end but still got it wrong ~20% of the time.<p>- Overstock is crazy expensive, both in the channel and in Nintendo Warehouses. If you order too much of a title and it turns out the title only has a core day 1 audience you or the channel which you made believe in the title is totally screwed.
every day that nintendo doesn't make it simple and available for people to play all the games from the past, 100 people discover emulation. the barrier to entry as far as technological know how to procure and operate said emulators has gotten easier and easier as the years go by. they in turn tell more people, who keep the news flowing to more and more and more. the losses by nintendo, and the publishers of games added up over all that time must be astronomical. imagine the emulation capabilities of launchbox combined with a library of roms the size that most the target demographic could pirate online with a negligable amount of effort, on a non jailbroken ps5 or xbox or switch. these companies are missing out on so much cash flow from what are essentially dead revenue streams. and customer satisfaction would be through the damn roof..
I’ll never understand why Nintendo doesn’t do a subscription to play any old game older than say three generations.<p>Nintendo is in the best position - since they never focused on specs all of their consoles are easily emulate-able.<p>There’s really no excuse. Even from a revenue perspective I’m confident they’d make more money this way. Make it so it works on any device - again Nintendo can do this because the consoles don’t require great computers to emulate.<p>You probably could run 100 gba emulators simultaneously at 120fps on a modern commodity desktop.
Being unable to find a legit way to play GBA games was what got me into emulators in the first place. Eventually I "cracked" my Nintendo 3DS and turned it into a homebrew console, which was for me a really interesting and fulfilling technical challenge. It basically allowed for the whole Nintendo handheld catalogue (barring technical capabilities of the hardware itself), as well as some really cool customization. Highly recommend if you're looking for a handheld device that can play most Nintendo games pre-Switch.
For those of you who aren't up on your Nintendo emulation pricing schemes, here's the current model. If you want to play an old NES, SNES, and N64 game, Nintendo makes those available on their current console, the Switch. However, unlike other games, those classic Nintendo titles are not for sale. Instead, you may access them via a monthly subscription, "Nintendo Switch Online."<p>However, the N64 titles are behind a second paywall. If you want to play Mario 64, you need to sign up for a SECOND monthly subscription called the "Expansion Pack." Also however, if you want your kids to also be able to play N64 games on their profiles, that requires a "Family Membership."<p>Nintendo ties a few other perks into the plan, like a really tiny Amazon Prime, so the base subscription also unlocks online play in general (like an XBox or Playstation subscription), and expansion packs for certain games require the second subscription, like the latest features for Animal Crossing or new tracks for Mario Kart.<p>Charging me $20 to play Ocarina of Time is a lot, but it's a reasonable price that I would probably pay well before I started looking into emulation. But renting Ocarina of Time to me for $80/year is just awful.
My guess is that this will be officially released as GB/GBA apps for the Nintendo Online service once the eShops for the Wii U and 3DS are discontinued next year,
Finally. This barely helps, but at least now there might be some access to legacy portable games that does not require a significant monetary investment and/or piracy
The only major monetary value I see to these emulators on Switch is:<p>- an extra thing to make the money you're paying to play Mario Kart/Smash/etc online with your friends a bit easier to stomach
- an extra multiplayer option to have when your friends are bored of the other games<p>Gameboy games don't offer much of the latter and I think the general response to seeing GB games on a big screen at this stage is probably closer to "I can't believe it was so primitive!" than anything else.<p>When you go past the number of people who use emulators on PC/android devices, the number who engage in netplay services is astronomically low because it requires a bit of effort on both sides. I'd imagine the novelty of easy access functional netplay is probably worth drastically more than a more complete or better optimised set of emulation options, and even then it's not worth that much.
The evidence that it's not official based on a menu option showing EZFlash doesn't mean it's not official only based on my knowledge that some first party and close third party console developers in the past have used whatever is cheap and easy to get their hands on.
> experts tell Ars that a pair of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulators for the Switch that leaked online Monday show signs of being official products of Nintendo's European Research & Development division (NERD)<p>...did they form that acronym on purpose?
I thought I was having a stroke when I first booted up the NES virtual console and the start screen from Mario Land (original GameBoy) flashed on screen for a split second. Anyone else have this experience, all most two years ago?
News: Nintendo hired developers (1st party and 3rd party) to make emulators for older consoles but never released them.<p><insert awkward look monkey puppet meme><p>Footnote: I have no knowledge of either of the leaked emulators.