

But I haven't bought a new digital title over a few dollars since.Įasier to pirate and a better product. That said they did allow a 1-time port to the Wii U so I did port a lot of titles over to the Wii U (of course that was fraught with glitchiness but I did get it to work eventually).

And if your console went belly-up all you could do was beg Nintendo customer service for help. I know there's overhead (licensing, digital manuals, etc) but still.Īs it is I personally stopped buying Wii VC games when I realized they were single console purchases only (back when we had 2 Wiis). I'd buy plenty! I'd think they'd make piles of money. If they implemented an account system like a rational, up-to-date publisher (Sony, Steam, Microsoft) and you could buy games to play across your family's 3DSes/WiiU/NX? Nintendo has control over it and the same rep who commented here (CeeCee) has mentioned in the past that Nintendo is no longer accepting VC titles for older consoles (GB/GBC, NES, SNES). Lufia 2, for example, would make a great mobile game with just the addition of quicksaving. There's no reason they couldn't give us a port to (platform of choice). After all, in a world where people can sell literal trash from an Atari landfill for thousands of dollars, a copy of Excitebike that's been sitting at Nintendo HQ for 30 years would probably fetch a pretty penny.ĭoes Nintendo own those publishing rights? Or just control over the Virtual Console? Maybe others will decide to follow Natsume's lead in cleaning out their stocks on eBay. We can only hope other publishers are sitting on similar stockpiles of hard-to-find gaming classics in some forgotten office closet. Over time, these copies slowly added up until we had a fairly extensive collection of classic titles, just not in large numbers for any singular game.” CeeCee provided Tiny Cartridge with a picture of the shelves at the Natsume offices, showing dozens of original PlayStation, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS games the company will presumably be auctioning off soon. “Review copies before digital distribution was a thing, warranty needs, etc. Advertisementįurther Reading Atari landfill cartridges sell for up to $1,500 each at auctionWhy clear out the offices now? "We’ve kept copies around of games for a variety of reasons,” Natsume Community Manager CeeCee told Nintendo DS blog Tiny Cartridge.
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But it also has quite a few well-regarded games that are relatively hard to find in factory-sealed condition today, including SNES action games Pocky & Rocky, epic RPG Lufia II, and farming simulator Harvest Moon 64. Natsume's collection of sellable legacy titles boasts a lot of forgettable, low-cost "classics" such as Reel Fishing on the Wii and Math Play for the DS. But the Japanese publisher's eBay store has recently started to include brand new copies of older games from Natsume's back catalog, plucked directly from the company's office closets. To be sure, the bulk of Natsume's business still comes from the niche games it continues to publish for the Wii U, 3DS, and PlayStation Vita. But at least one storied game publisher is currently getting in on the act, making some decent profits by clearing out sealed copies of classic games that have been sitting around its office shelves for decades. Usually, though, those mint condition games are being resold by forward-thinking collectors looking to make a profit. 9These days, it's not uncommon to see unopened, "factory sealed" copies of games from decades-past selling on eBay for huge markups over the original price they demanded on the shelves of Funcoland or Babbage's. Further Reading How I launched 3 consoles (and found true love) at Babbage’s store no.
