[Wii] Virtual Console Rip-off

Originally Posted by ramoth

Also, even at the current prices, I doubt it's terribly profitable for Nintendo. It costs money to maintain servers, buy bandwidth, pay programmers, etc. The problem with distributing things over the 'nte is that as popularity increases, costs can go up quite quickly.

Really? I would think taking all the packaging and production costs out would leave them with pure profit for every game sold. I assume they're already planning on fixing the other aspects by means of other revenue. I mean, imagine if one of the FTP owners here got $5 for every album downloaded...

I'll end up using it sparingly and mostly for games I don't have. I won't be phasing out my trusty SNES or NES anytime soon, but I skipped the N64 and it'll be cool to play catch-up. I'm seriously hoping we'll see some titles that never came over on the original systems...I imagine Nintendo would make a pretty penny off games like the old Fire Emblems and all of those Square RPG's that never left Japan. Bangai-O for 64 wouldn't be too shabby either.

But the non-transferring thing does sound kind of lame...I was assuming it would be more like the games would be linked to an account and if you needed to, you could grab them again. That would make more sense...Maybe link the account with a serial number and have the two be transferable if need be.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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Now imagine if he had millions of people downloading from him. Servers and programmers and bandwidth all cost money. Remember, these games were originally selling for 40 or 50 dollars.

True, but the cost of materials (the carts), shipping, marketing and overall developing/testing expenses are taken out of the equation, so you're left with pure profit on games that made back their development costs many years ago. Which...is smart business, if I do say so myself.

I'm sure if Nintendo has a full network in place, they can handle the upload requirements and still make out in the greens every month by plenty. I'm sure they thought this through and compensated for that.

I'd be curious to see the sales figures and about how much they can pocket of the game fees. Even if they only got to collect 1/2 of each VC game's fee, that's some good side money.

And really...NES games aren't that big. I'm sure even I could upload a million copies of Super Mario Brothers if I had to. At $5 apiece...Man, I'd be raking it in.

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You can delete the game and re-download it at your leisure, which is way more than the iTunes Store allows. In theory, you could buy everything on VC, even though you couldn't store it all on the Wii at once.

Sorry, what I meant was transfer to another console (in the event something happens). I meant make it so you can transfer another serial number to your account.

There's nowhere I can't reach.