Nintendo Just Broke The Hearts Of GameCube Scalpers Everywhere With Switch 2

I’m happy that people who don’t/won’t engage in piracy will finally get a reasonable option to enjoy these games. Remember that the online subscription service is only a platform to hire and shouldn’t affect the physical collectors market greatly.

"It will no longer cost $500 to play Path of Radiance!"

if you think paying an individual 500 dollars for an old used copy of a game is more "moral" than downloading it, i think you should examine that.

@Sketcz If you're looking to retain value, this is probably the worst time to sell them. A bunch of people are likely selling their GC collections in the wake of this announcement and the general Switch 2 price models. Maybe a good opportunity if you're looking to add to your GameCube collection, though.

@-wc- I think it's less about morality and more about not wanting to rob a bank in order to play it.

...But with the Switch 2's prices, what's the difference? HEYOOOOO

I made a tidy profit selling my GC games a few years ago. This online service though is still a joke. 👍

I don't see this affecting the collector's market. No casual gamer was ever going to pay those prices.

Are physical media collectors considered scalpers now?

Pleased to see this. The NSO does have its flaws, but this is a terrific way that make these selected title available to a wider audience of gamers to enjoy.

Yes, physical copies and original hardware are great, but I've run out of physical space to invest in more retro hardware. This is a great way for me to enjoy and explore a back catalogue that I don't yet know that well, and without NSO would be unlikely to get to explore.

@no_donatello This is the answer. These kinds of things never really have a long term impact on prices of old expensive games being purchased by collectors.

You can buy excellent versions of the vast majority of Neo Geo games on PS4 or Switch for $7.99, not to mention the many other ways to pay between other re-releases, emulation, etc. That doesn't mean Neo Geo AES home carts suddenly got cheap. Quite the opposite, in fact! Same thing for past systems that make it to online services like NSO, collectors buying expensive arcade boards for games that have good accessible console ports, etc.

And especially given that NSO is subscription only, that's not going to impact the prices on used Gamecube games.

I don't think digital releases will have much of an impact. People want the originals to own the actual thing I suppose, or they would just find a way to emulate it? I still have a copy of Chibi-Robo in the loft I think. I don't buy retro games at a high price these days, have just mostly kept the games I bought over the years.

I know I'm being pedantic here, but if you're buying a Nintendo Switch 2 solely to play Path of Radiance, you're still paying $500...

That said, I fully realize the Switch 2 is a better value for the money, and I'm happy to see Nintendo is going to start offering up their GameCube library. (The Expansion Pass is now finally worth the money in my eyes.) Maybe we'll all finally get to enjoy Doshin the Giant?

That said, that said, I still hope Nintendo will offer a way to purchase the games individually a la their former Virtual Console service.

And hey, why settle there? Let's start seeing some re-releases of classic games for their native consoles. (I would love to see a proper SNES release for Star Fox 2, for example.)

...No, it'll still cost almost exactly $520 to play Path of Radiance. Console is $450 and the game is behind a $70 subscription. And then another $70 for the next year.

And the next year

And the next year

might affect the prices a bit, but there will always be value in owning the games rather than having them tied to a subscription

I do remember after Wild Guns dropped on Wii VC, scalpers started flooding ebay with listings. 200 people on any given day asking $200 for the same game is a sign the game probably isn't rare enough to warrant a $200 price, yet people did it.

i feel sorry for people who have never ventured into the world of emulation.... it's as if they are legitimately afraid to download a file from the internet and consider it the greatest sin imaginable. or that the internet police may come knocking at their door. yikes.

Is it still a scalper if the game is old?! Maybe, I guess.

@Porco That may be true in a lot of cases, but emulation os also not always very good. Gamecube is a good example of it being bad, so is N64.

Also, I feel sorry for people who emulate games. They never seem to play anything. They just cycle through their endless lists of every game, region and variant that ever existed whilst never landing on something to actually play. When they do finally pick a game, it's something obvious that everyone knows about and they play it for the shortest time before being distracted by another game.

I buy my games because I actually play and complete them all one by one before buying my next one. It's an absolute joy.

Emulation is definitely bad in my view. It makes people take gaming for granted.