Friday, April 14, 2017

Unbusinessy is a word, right?

I'm not like a business person or anything, but if I ran a video game company and had like a super-popular product that everyone wanted to buy, I think I'd keep making it. Like, until everyone was totally sick of it and then for several years after. So Nintendo's decision to discontinue the NES Classic Edition seems a little, you know, un-business-y.
Pictured: Someone who is a business person and who does run
a video game company. So Like what's up, Tatsumi Kimishima?
You disgust me. Just eat the cookie,
I mean, it's not going to kill you.
If you're rolling your eyes at whatever the hell I'm on about now, that's ok, you probably lead a rich, active life with friends and outdoors activities. Congratulations, you deserve a cookie. Which you probably won't eat. Because you're healthy. Anyway, allow me to explain what I'm talking about. A few months ago, Nintendo released this tiny version of the original 8-bit NES console that played thirty games, came with a replica of the original controller and cost like $70, which as nostalgia goes, is fairly reasonable.

People love it. Especially grown-up 30-somethings like me who, for whatever reason, can't let their childhoods go. It probably has something to do with unfulfilled expectations of adulthood or possibly some kind of vitamin D deficiency. I don't know. I'm not a psychologist. The point is that the thing was super-popular and they sold like 1.5 million of them.
Mostly to scalpers who turn around and re-sell them for three times the price.
"Uh, what was the last one, jerks?
Yeah, that's us. We hate fun."

-The guys that run Nintendo
And look, like I mentioned before, I'm not a video game industry expert (or a psychologist, or an airline CEO, remember that thing about unfulfilled expectations?), but this thing was basically a Raspberry Pi in a tiny plastic shell full of thirty games that Nintendo mostly owns already, so it's not like this thing could have cost them all that much to produce, right? So why the sudden discontinuation? Market trends? Just to be jerks? Do they hate money? I don't know, but I have a theory based on my vast experience sitting around thinking about these kind of things.

I think this has to do with the Switch. And before you roll your eyes again, relax, I'll explain. You know, you really should try and get out less. So Switch is the new, new Nintendo console and they haven't yet announced their plans for Virtual Console. That's an online service that lets you pay them again for games you probably already own but might want to play again on the new machine. Yup, my guess is that they don't wan't people buying NES Classics when they could be spending five or ten dollars a pop on downloaded games.
"Because we-a never leave a-the money on the a-table!"
-Luigi at a recent 
shareholder's meeting

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