http://www.dromble.com/2015/01/21/f...os-culture-third-party-support-and-much-more/
From what I understand, you were involved with the Wii’s Virtual Console service in the early years. In a previous interview, you mentioned how you did market research to figure out the ideal pricing policy for the Virtual Console on the Wii.
Can you talk about how you and Nintendo of America came up with these prices? Why did you choose to price VC games with a flat-rate by console? For example, I think we can agree that not all NES games are the same quality as something like Super Mario Bros 3.
Five years from now, do you predict that it will become more difficult to sell old retro games at those current prices? Example: Will consumers always be willing to pay $5 for Ice Climber?
Adelman: First we got a sense from market research about what platforms people were interested in. We had pretty much every classic system on the list, and these were the ones that stood out as the heavy favorites. We also did some market research on people’s willingness to pay, and came up with these prices accordingly. There was a lot of debate about whether to charge more for Super Mario Bros. 3 as opposed to Ice Climbers, and we ultimately decided on a fixed price per platform for a couple reasons. First, it’s simpler to manage from an internal processing perspective. If each game had a separate price, there would be lots of opinions about each game, and consolidating all of that feedback would be very time consuming. Second,
there was a little feeling of holding people’s childhood hostage if we priced certain games higher than others. To take an absurd example, let’s say we charged $50 for Super Mario Bros. There would be some people who really have strong nostalgia for that game who would begrudgingly pay it. But they’d probably feel cheated and exploited.
Nintendo understands its importance to a lot of people’s childhoods, so they really want to avoid undoing that goodwill. Finally, everyone has a game that, for them, was their biggest memory as a child. I remember I probably put in over 100 hours on Nobunaga’s Ambition with my brothers. For other people, that game might be Ice Climbers. I haven’t seen any research on this, but I suspect the majority of sales on Virtual Console are from people who have already played the game as a child. I’m sure there are some cases of people going back and playing games they missed, but if I had to guess, I’d say that’s around 25% of the market. The other 75% are people reliving memories.
It’s hard to say whether the old prices will stay in the long run. My gut says that demand overall is not very price sensitive. Even $10 for N64 games is not going to break the bank for anyone. I think the bigger factor is fatigue. A lot of people have scratched that nostalgia itch, so they may not feel a need to play those games again.
Pretty much the same reason that teenagers and younger drop the "F" bomb every other word because it just smacks of maturity.
