[jbeam]

> How does this lead to making "so much money"? Purely from hardware sales?

Yeah, hardware margins for gaming systems are often not great. The point is that you also have to buy games for it. Similar to how printers are priced (it's the ink that makes the money).

[SifJar]

Exactly, and if you can continue to play all your old games on your new system, you're probably less inclined to buy a lot of new games - probably buy one or two (otherwise why bother getting a new system?), but if you couldn't play your old games on it, you may initially buy a few more new games to justify the system purchase etc.

[huffmsa]

Nintendo fans aren't like that though.

They'll buy the new releases. And as a sample size of 1, I'd probably pay $10-$20 for each classic game if I knew it had indefinite portability. Same way I'm happy to pay for classic books.

I missed Metroid prime when it came out, and there's no real way for me to go back to it without getting my GameCube from my parents and finding a disk on eBay.

Just think of all of the kids who've heard about all of these classic games, love the latest version, and would gladly dive into the rest of the series, if it were available.

People are still getting excited because the source code for a 25 year old game has finally been stolen and leaked. 2401