[zelon88]

I like drawing metaphors from Tamiya. Tamiya is a Japanese scale modelling and remote-controlled vehicle company with a loooong history of making quality products that the industry just eats up. Like Nintendo, Tamiya has always been in the back row when it comes to technological innovation, but lead the pack when it came to functionality, reliability, and quality. Just like Nintendo, there are Tamiya fan clubs where people are enthusiastic about products from this one company. The rest of the industry doesn't exist to them. I'm trying to illustrate how Tamiya is to the R/C world what Nintendo is to console games.

That said, vintage Tamiya products new in original packaging from the 70s and 80s can sell for thousands and thousands of dollars. Simple plastic and aluminum parts that were consumable in the 80s were selling for hundreds of dollars in the late 2000s. The market was a rough place. I have about a dozen antique Tamiya models, so I was one of those people engaged in bidding wars for 1/4" long tie-rod ends. A brand new Tamiya in the 80s was probably about $100 for a rolling kit. Now people are paying that for individual parts. Nobody was having fun with their models anymore. Everyone was just dusting them off and spending money keeping them pretty.

Tamiya had to get the kids playing with their models again. They had to take this exclusive, elitist market they created by accident 30 years ago and start making money off of it again.

So Tamiya re-released nearly ALL of their vintage kits. Brand new, with original design, documentation, decals, and packaging. This was in addition to their new models and high-tech racing vehicles which were still being released on a regular schedule at the same time. Initially all the collectors (myself included) were livid, because for a while it meant my $1,100 Bruiser 3-speed was only worth $500. That didn't happen either. For a time the prices dipped significantly, but collectors still demanded vintage parts to repair their vintage models. The prices soon stabilized. Now that market is healthy and stable, vintage vehicles can be repaired cheaply if desired, and collectors can still spend thousands on NIB models.

If Nintendo embraced their market they could possibly reap the same benefits. The enthusiasm for their products is there. Tamiya has shown it is possible to separate collector demand from commodity demand and still have those ecosystems thrive side-by-side. I think Nintendo could pull that off as well.

[JansjoFromIkea]

I doubt it, Nintendo had huge success from the NES classic precisely because of their absurdly protective attitudes towards old games. They've managed to retain some level of serious value onto 35 year old games in an industry where many games are being given away for next to nothing within a few years of release.

I think they've pushed the NES stuff about as far as they possibly can and the NES classic was something of a final cash grab from those games, but they can absolutely still bleed some value from SNES onwards.

As far as that Tamiya model is concerned, surely Nintendo are doing about as close to that as they can within their medium with Link's Awakening on Switch? It's close to the exact same game, released at a price comparable to the original release, but with technological updates to make up for where the original would no longer match up?

[dragontamer]

Case in point: it was Dreamcast's ability to be hacked and run CD-ROMs illegitimately which probably killed it.

"Open Source Video Game Hardware" is a misnomer. Video game developers (ie: EA or Activision) demand DLC and DRM models to extract more money out of "whale" video game players. A leak like this harms the #1 customer of a console: the 3rd party developers.

Even if a console is a hit with consumers (ie: Dreamcast), if it is opened up for easy piracy and loses DRM protections, the 3rd party developers will stay away, killing the platform.

--------

For a more modern example, consider Ouya vs Android vs iPhone. The locked down "walled garden" DRM model wins for developers, even if it loses on consumer freedom.

[Grazester]

SEGA's history with their previous console and console add-on completely burned consumers. There was the 32x addon for the Genesis and the SegaCD which SEGA did not support very well. This burnt consumers. There was also a lot of fighting between SEGA of Japan and SEGA of North America at this point.

They then did a surprise launch for the $400 Saturn months earlier than expected. Retailers were not prepare, developers were not prepared and consumer were not prepared. Due to the shortage of available units SEGA only allocated unit to big box retailers. K.B. Toys was so angry that they vowed never to sell the Saturn and really never sold it. Developers did not have their games ready for the surprise launch and were pissed off about it.

SEGA handles the launch so badly that at E3 that year for the Playstation keynote on the upcoming launch Sony just went up on stage and said "$299" and left the stage after. Here is the clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExaAYIKsDBI

The Saturn was horrible to develop for due to its complex and cobbled together design and SEGA's development tools were lacking and developer had to make their own tools. Sony on the other hand made sure developers got everything they need to take advantage of the system. SEGA then prematurely announced the death of the Saturn before the Dreamcast was even officially announced.This was a fuck you to developers once more who still had games under development for the system. The Saturn did not even get an original Sonic game....likely really

SEGA later would announce the Dreamcast and got everything right with this console but at this point the damage was already done. Consumer wanted nothing to do with SEGA, developers were skeptical, EA never supported the Dreamcast and SEGA had already burnt through all their cash. Their president had to bail them out with his own money, he would later die.

Sony and the Playstation 2 hype machine was now in full effect. People were waiting to see what Sony could offer to compete. Sony was promising Toy Story graphics and all sorts of nonsense and people ate it up, foregoing the Dreamcast to wait for the Playstation 2 launch the following year.

There was an in depth analysis of Dreamcast sales done a very years ago and it was determined that the sales of the console did not increase when the system was "cracked". This meant people were just NOT buying the console period as opposed to buying it to just play pirated games. So it was not the piracy that killed it.

SEGA just could not compete against itself and Sony any longer.

[mjevans]

DVD playback was also a major sell feature for the PS2. The Dreamcast also was dialup only in the era when DSL and cable connections were just starting to become mainstream (and at least in the US, BBS was practically dead and normal ISP dialup was too varied to work on a console).

SEGA really did get everything else right with the hardware; even having a semi-handheld as part of the controller. The market was just not ready for it.

[mywittyname]

The issue with the Dreamcast was 99.99% piracy. The console was brilliant, the games were brilliant, and it sold very well and was incredibly popular.

But anyone with a CD burner could make illegal copies. I was like 15 at the time, and hardly technically savvy, yet I had tons of pirated games for the Dreamcast. At least the PSX required mod-chips to play pirated games.

Sales were pretty strong for the console for the first year or so, and the first-party titles available were really strong. But hardly any third party devs made games for it, particularly EA, so the console lacked staying power. There's only so many games SEGA themselves could afford to release.

[ginko]

> Case in point: it was Dreamcast's ability to be hacked and run CD-ROMs illegitimately which probably killed it.

I'm not convinced. I only heard about the ability of playing regular CD-ROMs on Dreamcast way after it was already dead. If anything Dreamcast is a great example of terrible mismanagement by SEGA.

And if CD copying killed the Dreamcast then the PSX would have been dead 3 times over. I knew tons of people that shared burned games for that one.

[T-hawk]

The difference there was that the Dreamcast could play burned CD-R copies unmodded, while the PSX needed a hardware mod to break the protection against that, a significant barrier to entry. Later it could be done with a plug-in to the expansion port, but early PSX mod chips required soldering.

The Dreamcast also came four years later, which mattered; many more people had broadband connections capable of downloading a full CD-ROM in 2000 than in 1996.

That said, I agree with your first point - Dreamcast piracy really only became a thing after it was clear it would lose the market battle to the other consoles. Piracy didn't kill it, at most hastened the death by a few months.

[anthk]

Still, the PSX was pirated a lot more. On broadband, even in 2000 it wasn't as easy as to pirate N64 roms in order to be played into a PC.

The DC lost to the PSX and later the PS2 with the builtin DVD video player killed it.

[aikinai]

Just another anecdote but I was a kid at the time and remember the selling point for Dreamcast among people I knew was specifically that you could just copy the games. Everyone had stacks of CDs they’d copy for new console owners.

[bobajeff]

I think the SegaCD, 32X and Saturn killed the Dreamcast. Maybe if they had done market testing before manufacturing and marketing and abandoning several different systems that people didn't buy they wouldn't have been so badly in debt by the time Dreamcast launched.

[sshumaker]

Adding to this - for much of the pre-digital distribution era, piracy+retailers+rentals sucked out nearly 80% of the profits of the ecosystem. It made it impossible to break even as a studio unless you had a top 20 title released that year. The economics always sucked there - publishers fund development against royalties, break even happened after recouping this advance plus whatever costs the publisher larded on, per-unit royalties were often as little as a few bucks per game sold, and the publisher owned the IP. As a studio you had to get a continuous string of big hits as a single flop might put you out of business.

[kingbirdy]

Nintendo is still getting value from the NES and SNES with their online program as well. The membership is $20/yr and one of the very few things it includes is an emulator with a few dozen games from each system.

[ginko]

One of my dreams was always if Nintendo released "development diary" editions of old titles(in particular Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time) where you'd get to try out a playable showcase of the game's builds at particular states in development from very early initial tests, to Alpha, Beta, various trade conference demos etc. Each with developer commentary, perhaps design sketches, deleted content and maybe maybe also some source code.

Essentially like what's pretty much standard for special edition BluRays. Pack that in a nice hardcover booklet and people would eat it up.

[striking]

You might enjoy the content on https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor and https://www.unseen64.net/, among others.

[ginko]

Yeah, I'm aware of these. The point is these sites exist because the interest is there but game developers aren't interested in serving it. That's why people try to find leaked beta copies and even resort to hacking like here.

[sleepydog]

I really enjoy reading about some of the techniques the developers use to get the most out of the hardware. Here are some of my favorites from recent memory:

https://medium.com/@gordonnl/wind-waker-graphics-analysis-a0...

https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-ef...

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2014/03/15/pixel-processing-pro...

[GuiA]

Valve did this for a number of their games (e.g. Portal, Half Life 2). You can play the game in a developer commentary mode, where (iirc) "orbs" that play recorded audio commentary are littered throughout the regular game world.

[robotnikman]

I remember replaying the Portal games just to find and hear all the developer commentary snippets.

[detritus]

Wait - so I can finally buy the Monster Beetle I dearly wanted as a 14 year old?

I imagine the modern iterations are significantly better than those I drooled over as a child, with 30 odd years of improvements in electric motors and batteries?

[zelon88]

Yes and no. You can still buy a NiMH battery and a silver can brushed 540 motor if you want too. The price on that stuff has come down significantly. It's the LiPo batteries and brushless motors that cost all the money these days. Then again, they really are in a different league as far as performance and runtime. Back in the day of crystal radios if you wanted to go 50+ MPH you either had to have a nitro engine or you just had a 9T motor that killed your battery in 3 minutes.

Today's electric cars have aaaaalmost made nitro obsolete... not only from a reliability standpoint (like always) but from a performance standpoint as well. Obviously the market for nitro fun will always exist, but if you're just looking for performance these days there is no benefit nitro has over electric anymore.

[detritus]

I think you just cost me a few hundred quid..!

[elihu]

That was also my first thought as well. Those things were awesome.

[GuiA]

This is a very cool story, and makes me want to learn more about Tamiya. But the situation does not seem the same to me. People are - for the most part - able to play the old Nintendo games they want through the virtual console, backwards compatibility, remakes, or NES/SNES mini.

Yes, some N64 carts are selling for thousands on eBay - but that’s not preventing kids from playing that game if they want to.

[jrajav]

The virtual console is exactly how Nintendo lost faith with loyal consumers who want to stay above board. They sold them on the Wii and many fans bought in - but their purchases were not maintained with their digital account for a Wii U update, instead they had to physically transfer them. So far, just annoyances though.

The real problem came when they shipped the Switch with no virtual console at all. It's obviously easy to run NES and SNES games on even the cheapest modern hardware, so there's no excuse for not letting consumers own and play their games on any Nintendo console.

And maybe they just don't think it's worth spending time on shipping their old games, that it wouldn't be profitable? That would be fair enough, but they are spending time - they just released a whole batch of NES / SNES games to push their online subscription service. Of course, you don't get them just by owning them before - you have to buy them again.

It would have been easy to get and keep the good will of long-time loyal fans with a persistent and growing platform of their classic titles, but Nintendo opted for short-term investments instead of long-term in this case.

[013a]

The Switch has a NES/SNES virtual console; its unlimited access to every game available, bundled with the Nintendo Online subscription which costs $3/month or $20/year. There's maybe 30 or so games available for each of the old consoles. They even fake local multiplayer over Nintendo Online, allowing these classic games to be played with friends over the internet.

Gamecube emulation on the Switch may still be a little underpowered, just judging by the performance of the PC emulators (though, Nintendo has all the proprietary technical documentation and domain experts, so maybe not). Really, the N64 is the main console that people have wanted VC for, and have not gotten; an N64 VC would change the landscape for the Switch, that's for sure.

We've gotten some rumors that they're intending to release remakes of SM64, SMS, SMG, and possibly SMG2 as some kind of Mario Anniversary bundle this year. Frankly; while faithful copies of the original games with their original assets would be awesome, and I want that, I kind of want remakes more. I understand Nintendo's position here; the VC clearly did not make a tremendous amount of money. Maybe bundling with Nintendo Online will help fund more consoles and titles, but remakes are definitely easier to market and sell.

[humaniania]

52 NES and 26 SNES so far!

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/02/guide_nintendo_swit...

[skuthus]

To the OP's point, You can play some games with virtual console, but many games were released on only one or two newer consoles so you would effectively need to spend hundreds and sometimes thousands in order to actually play them all legally.

[Hamuko]

The strategy for Nintendo Switch Online is apparently to dripfeed classic games onto it. So if you for example want to play Mother (NES) or Mother 2 (SNES), you either need to emulate it on a PC, buy the actual retro consoles and games (or the SNES Classic for Mother 2), or get a Wii U and play it on the Wii U Virtual Console.

(If you want to play Mother 3 in English, you're going to have to resort to PC emulators.)

[skuthus]

I definitely don't blame Nintendo for using this strategy - I do however find it frustrating how unintuitive finding the games feels. Want to play Earthbound? Get a SNES classic. Want to play LOZ:Link to the Past? You can do it on the switch. Want to play Mario 2? Too bad. Its japan only. Etc.

[Hamuko]

Mario 2 is on the Switch in the west as well.