And it seems that mission is to see just how much it can get away with before people finally decide to stop blindly buying their stuff. Yup, Nintendo is once again courting controversy by, once again, making decisions that are decidedly not consumer-friendly. Heck, they aren’t even fan-friendly. The decision in question: selling Pokemon Fire Red and Leaf Green for $20 each.
Thatmight not sound too bad at first glance, but consider what it is that’s being sold here. These are 22 year old Game Boy Advance games, with absolutely no enhancements done whatsoever. No online battling, no online trading, no Pokemon Home and no widescreen support. It’s quite literally just the original 2004 versions of Fire Red and Leaf Green again. These are also only being sold digitally, so there isn’t even any collecting potential here. Oh, and they won’t be available in the Game Boy Advance portion of NSO either. It’s either fork over your $20 or nothing.
For comparison, Nintendo was selling Nintendo 64 games on the Wii Shop for about $10 back in 2007, and those games were, at the time, newer than these GBA games are to us now. Yet now we’ve gotta pay double the money for even less game. That’s just horrible value for your ever-increasingly-strained dollar, don’t you think?
It’d be one thing if these games had been enhanced in some way or had more features intergrated into them like most of the offerings on NSO. It’d be one thing if the base versions were on NSO while collectors could pay that $20 for a fun physical addition to their collection. You know, like an actual cartridge in a box with an old school manual featuring throwback artwork or something. But no. All you get for your $20 is a straight, unenhanced digital port of a $20+ year-old game.
I hate that I’ve basically got nothing good to say about Nintendo anymore, because I absolutely loved them even a few years into the Switch era. I’d like to be able to give them a proverbial pat on the back again someday, but they’re just not giving me anything to work with. Maybe one day that’ll change, but something tells me it’s going to be a while.
What’s your take on this? How much do you think unaltered ports of super old games should cost?
Image from the Nintendo website
VIRTUAL BASTION 
I mean…yeah. I ain’t defending it, but if I thought people would pay more money for something if it was sold separately then I’d do the same thing.
And I think we both know there are plenty of people who will just buy this shit sight unseen.
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Yeah, you’re definitely right there. Pokemon is one of those things that everyone buys just by fact of its mere existence, and that is exactly why Nintendo is comfortable doing this. I’m definitely just “old man yelling at cloud” here, but what can I say? It irks me. XD
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These ROMs (let’s be honest, they’re just ROMs) should cost at most, $7-$8. I don’t understand why people feel the need to defend overpriced products. I love this duo (and thankfully I have my original cartridges), but not even 10-year-old me would defend that. That price point (considering what GBA games cost on the Wii U Virtual Console) is laughable. Overpriced products on eBay should have zero bearing on Nintendo’s business practices.
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