NES Classic Edition Has Been Discontinued

[r3d3mpt10n]

Glad I got mine when i did

[Valentyn]

Absolutely mental. The product was barely in production, they could never fulfil the pre-orders and now it's been axed?

Seems I might just need to emulate if I ever want to play these again. Loved Ice Climber is a little fella.

 

Shame really.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

16 hours ago, Kherm said:

It's almost like they don't want money

Well they haven't figured out that if you sell products you get money.

 

 

[AshleyAshes]

8 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

1) Technically speaking you don't own a game, you buy a license to play said game but not the game itself and included in that license to play is a clause that's says you agree to not modify or copy the game. From a legal point of view if you dump a ROM or obtain a dump under the premise that you own the original then you are in breach of your license. Now its worth mentioning that in some countries making a backup for protection is legal and in these countries the license cannot supersede the law but in the large majority of countries no such law exists and in those cases you are not allowed to dump a ROM or own a dump alongside the original.

 

2) In order to dump a ROM you (usually but not always) have to modify the hardware and use it in a way it was not intended to be used which is also in breach of the user license for the hardware.

 

3) By dumping a ROM you are extracting copyrighted code from hardware which opens you up to a potential lawsuit, if they can prove your facilitating the decompilation of their code then you are totally screwed.

 

4) The act of downloading copyrighted material is in of itself illegal in most countries whether you own the original or not.

 

The thing is, most companies simply don't care about their old games enough to bother protecting them and most of them are clever enough to realise that ignoring emulation is good for their brand image.

 

Nintendo on the other hand are very different. Don't fuck about with Nintendo stuff because they have shown that their more than willing to sue people and websites in order to protect their games, no matter how old they are.

 

AFAIK no one has ever been prosecuted for owning ROMs so the law is still very much grey in that regard. It takes a testing of the license by a court to set a precedence. I do know that Nintendo used DMCA to remove their old ROMs from a shit tonne of websites a while back though.

 

Finally don't get me wrong, I'm not against emulation, I enjoy my Retropie as much as everyone else. I just see people parroting false information over and over again and misinformation is a dangerous thing.

Wow... There is a lot of false information here... Let's go from number one.

 

1) Yes you own the game.  If you own a physical copy of a game, such as a game cartridge, you own that game.  You can sell or even -rent- that physical cartridge out as much as you want.  While digital downloads are something you license, a physical copy is data you own.  To be clear however, I am not saying that the owner of the physical copy now owns the copyright to that game but they own physical control of that game.  No joke, you could just buy a bunch of physical copies of games or movies and open your own rental store.  The copyright owners can't say a word about it.  For the United States specifically, this is what is called 'First-sale Doctrine'.  You can read more about it here:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

 

2) No, you do not have to modify the hardware to dump a ROM.  They just have ROM dumpers that you insert a cart into and it copies the data.  No jokes.  It's a 
$20 piece of hardware for NES/FC.  You can get it here and there's similar hardware out there for most any other retro platform:

 

http://www.infiniteneslives.com/kazzo.php

 

Further more, any and all user licenses for the hardware only effect your rights to access additional services from the company, such as online services or such.  All of which is irrelevant to retro gaming.  Further more, take a look at this, while a limited edition item that sold out, the Analogue NT literally takes salvaged NES chips and rebuilds them into an entirely new, $500, machined aluminum cased, HDMI capable Nintendo, that the Nintendo company did not authorize but had no legal options to prevent.  You can do damn near whatever you want with your hardware modification wise.

 

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/07/analogue-nt-a-museum-grade-nes-for-a-museum-grade-price/

 

3) This would depend on what country you live in.  This is something called 'Format Shifting' and here in Canada for example, format shifting is entirely legal.  If you own copyrighted content you may copy that data to another format that so that you may enjoy.  In Canada however, it must be made clear that this does not cover defeating encryption schemes to copy that data.  But retro game consoles have no encryption schemes to bypass.  The ROMs are simply read off the cart with no modification.  The DMCA in the United States has similar provisions for format shifting, again with the encryption clause.  As an example, in the United States, you can rip your own music CDs to MP3, as there is no encryption or other copy protection scheme to bypass, and this is 'fair use' as a method of 'format shifting' under copyright law.  On the other hand, DVDs or Blu-Rays typically feature encryption so you could not rip those without violating copyright law in the US Or Canada.  (Excluding DVDs or BDs that do not feature encryption, though they are more typically seen on very small run videos in niche areas)  Why else do you think that you can use a VCR or DVR to record television broadcast to watch or rewatch later?  Yeah, there was even a huge legal case about this in the 1980's.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.

 

4) This one is fuzzy and you have to look at most cases involving piracy.  It's actually largely untested in law in a lot of places.  If you look carefully, few people have ever been charged for DOWNLOADING anything, they've been charged for SHARING something that they didn't have the right to share.  If you look at torrents it's impossible to download but not SHARE with others. The moment you are on that torrent you are also distributing data to other individuals.  A direct download of data that you already legally own a copy of is something that's really not been legally tested.

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

I did the less moral route and built my own with a RasPi 3. >_>

4 hours ago, Terryv said:

 Surprised that no one mentioned the fact that the NES classic used Pirates ROMs itself.

The only thing that guy proved was Nintendo used the INES format and it's likely Nintendo hired emulator developers to work on the Virtual Console and the NES Classic (if you don't think that's a thing, the guy who wrote Bleem! was later hired by Sony to do work on PS2 backwards compatibility, or something). So using the INES format would make sense.

[MeDownYou]

12 hours ago, Raskolnikov said:

Virtual Console on Switch.

 

Classic Edition is roughly 2$ per game, at 30 games, 60$ MSRP.

 

Regular price on Virtual Console is 5$ for game, for NES.

yeah but you sell 30 games when people only really want like 3 anyway and wouldn't buy the rest...or for those people who are 45 and bought these things are would flat out refuse anything like that.

[Mira Yurizaki]

4 minutes ago, MeDownYou said:

yeah but you sell 30 games when people only really want like 3 anyway and wouldn't buy the rest...or for those people who are 45 and bought these things are would flat out refuse anything like that.

To add to this... I wish people would stop putting a price on games like it's some kind of objective thing to do. There are games I've played I payed full price for that aren't all that long, but I had a blast playing them.

 

I would rather have a good time with the game that lasted 10 hours than spend 100 hours on it with 90% of that hating myself.

[AshleyAshes]

15 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I did the less moral route and built my own with a RasPi 3. >_>

I see this comment a lot and I think that when people make this comment they kinda miss the point.  It's not a 'Little Box That Plays Nintendo Games' but it is the physical item itself.  It is the retail packaging that is reminiscent of the retail packaging of the real NES from the 1980's and early 1990s.  It's that it's actually made by Nintendo and has that logo on the front.  It's the made by Nintendo controllers (Which undeniably have disgustingly short cables).  It's the fact that the NES Classic looks like a cute and tiny NES.  It's the whole package of 'what it is' as a physical entity.

 

It's kinda like seeing someone buy a copy of a book and commenting 'You could have just printed that text on your Deskjet'.  It's not about the text, it's about the physical book, it's cover, it's back, and seeing and knowing that it is sitting on your shelf.

 

That and that alone is why the NES Classic was the killer stocking stuffer of Christmas 2016.

 

I mean geez, I have Half-Life on Steam and better yet I have Black Mesa on Steam.  I still took a two hour round trip out of my workday a few months ago to buy this:

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

6 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

I see this comment a lot and I think that when people make this comment they kinda miss the point.  It's not a 'Little Box That Plays Nintendo Games' but it is the physical item itself.  It is the retail packaging that is reminiscent of the retail packaging of the real NES from the 1980's and early 1990s.  It's that it's actually made by Nintendo and has that logo on the front.  It's the made by Nintendo controllers (Which undeniably have disgustingly short cables).  It's the fact that the NES Classic looks like a cute and tiny NES.  It's the whole package of 'what it is' as a physical entity.

Well yes, I understand that. But I'm not someone who thinks that I need to have that particular thing if I want a little box to play NES games on.

 

Besides, I feel the NES Classic is more or less a fake that's trying to be real. Granted, it tries hard. But if I really wanted the real deal, I'll just head over to the local mom-and-pop retro gaming store and pick up an NES.

[Satisfoxy]

I seriously want to get into Nintendo stuff again but they keep shooting me in the foot by never being in stock with anything.

[Donut417]

20 hours ago, VagabondWraith said:

http://www.polygon.com/2017/4/13/15293030/nes-classic-edition-discontinued

 

 

I swear. Nintendo makes some of the stupidest decisions. I was wanting one for retail price and now they're discontinuing them 5 months later? WTH Nintendo. So the only way to get one is to pay $200+ dollars on eBay. I wanted one for nostalgia reasons but I guess that won't be happening as I refuse to pay scalpers prices.

Fucking pisses me the fuck off. I would have bought one, but not for $300, because all these fuckers buy this stuff and try to make a huge profits on reselling it. Greedy bastards. 

[Andreas Lilja]

7 hours ago, MeDownYou said:

yeah but you sell 30 games when people only really want like 3 anyway and wouldn't buy the rest...or for those people who are 45 and bought these things are would flat out refuse anything like that.

True but on the Virtual Console they don't have to pay for a product (except digital distribution), so it's even less than 2$ each. According to Wiki they made roughly 90$ million in sales off it, not a really big deal at all. 

 

I see it as a mostly publicity stunt. After discontinuation, people will ask for alternatives and the Switch will be recommended. 

 

Nintendo has relative inelastic demand. Just the fact that they charge 10$ for Super Mario Run..

[SansVarnic]

Welp I was planning on buying one this summer, guess I wont now...  

[suicidalfranco]

9 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

I see this comment a lot and I think that when people make this comment they kinda miss the point.  It's not a 'Little Box That Plays Nintendo Games' but it is the physical item itself.  It is the retail packaging that is reminiscent of the retail packaging of the real NES from the 1980's and early 1990s.  It's that it's actually made by Nintendo and has that logo on the front.  It's the made by Nintendo controllers (Which undeniably have disgustingly short cables).  It's the fact that the NES Classic looks like a cute and tiny NES.  It's the whole package of 'what it is' as a physical entity.

 

It's kinda like seeing someone buy a copy of a book and commenting 'You could have just printed that text on your Deskjet'.  It's not about the text, it's about the physical book, it's cover, it's back, and seeing and knowing that it is sitting on your shelf.

 

That and that alone is why the NES Classic was the killer stocking stuffer of Christmas 2016.

 

I mean geez, I have Half-Life on Steam and better yet I have Black Mesa on Steam.  I still took a two hour round trip out of my workday a few months ago to buy this:

want a real NES experience in 2017? get the analogue nt NES system. The NES mini as already been shown to just be an emulator machine in the same vein as the raspberry pi and it won't be missed considering how lacking it was compared to this

https://youtu.be/3dgnD93pwX0

[rawrdaysgoby]

They must be idiots.... it was selling so well... I mean seriously You think it would really affect the sales of the switch I truthfully doubt that People buy the the NES classic for different reasons over the switch.... it was a plastic console with 30 games they don't really use for anything anymore it was a Single pcb maybe cost like 10$ total to make hell even the R&D for this project might have been less then a million....

[PepperButt]

On 4/14/2017 at 9:46 AM, ShadowTechXTS said:

Ahem

 

EMULATORS!!!

Pls no ban theres legitimate ways to use emulators, I'm not promoting piracy.

i mean this is probably the reason

there is almost no reason to continue production for general consumer

this was a good move to sell to collectors and hardcore fans and they already sold to a bunch

[MeDownYou]

10 minutes ago, rawrdaysgoby said:

They must be idiots.... it was selling so well... I mean seriously You think it would really affect the sales of the switch I truthfully doubt that People buy the the NES classic for different reasons over the switch.... it was a plastic console with 30 games they don't really use for anything anymore it was a Single pcb maybe cost like 10$ total to make hell even the R&D for this project might have been less then a million....

I mean conveniently for them all the translation work to HDMI was done just before they started this by the community so yeah r&d literally just could have been a few thousand let me repeat that thousand.

[Andreas Lilja]

17 minutes ago, rawrdaysgoby said:

They must be idiots.... it was selling so well... I mean seriously You think it would really affect the sales of the switch I truthfully doubt that People buy the the NES classic for different reasons over the switch.... it was a plastic console with 30 games they don't really use for anything anymore it was a Single pcb maybe cost like 10$ total to make hell even the R&D for this project might have been less then a million....

The thing is that people will now say to buy the Switch if you want to legally play NES titles. And people who get the Switch for this reason will end buying something else they wouldn't otherwise to justify the ~300$ purchase they just made.

 

 

 

 

[AshleyAshes]

56 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

want a real NES experience in 2017? get the analogue nt NES system. The NES mini as already been shown to just be an emulator machine in the same vein as the raspberry pi and it won't be missed considering how lacking it was compared to this

While the Analogue NT is indeed an impressive piece of kit and really a 'must have' for someone seeking one of the best modern experiences for an NES game, it's price tag is a big issue.  What made the NES Classic a 'Killer Stocking Stuffer' was it's offical Nintendo branding and a retail price of $59.99 USD.

[Bleedingyamato]

22 hours ago, Satisfoxy said:

they keep shooting me in the foot by never being in stock with anything.

I know that feeling...    The Switch was released over a month ago and even now it's barely possible find one unless you happen to stumble across a store that just got them in shortly before you visit that store.  

 

That's how I got mine earlier this week.  I just happened to go to a target store that had gotten some in that day and luckily for me had 6 left at the time 

 

I've been wanting to get a different case for it but nowhere I've been to has the one I want.  Same for the pro controller.  Though it's been a few days since I last checked but those seem rare too.  

 

Between that and the crap state of the Switch eshop atm if it weren't for Breath of the Wild there'd be no point to getting a Switch IMO.  

 

For example: I wanted to buy I Am Setsuna to have a second game to play but in the only two categories of games on the Switch eshop, best sellers and recent releases I think they are, this game is mysteriously missing.

 

There is a search feature I could've used but that should not be the only way to find any game since you'd have to know what to search for in order to find hidden games like I Am Setsuna.

 

I noticed in the news "app" or whatever it would be called on my Switch that there was an item about roleplaying games on the Switch eshop and I found Setsuna through that.  But there is no "view all games" or options to view the various genres of games.  No options at all for sorting through available eshop items and possibly other games besides Setsuna that people would easily miss since they are apparently hidden atm.

[Yoinkerman]

Yay I guess good thing I have two

[Okjoek]

I wasn't going to get it anyways because it doesn't have Tetris. 

[PlayStation 2]

On 4/14/2017 at 7:30 AM, Terryv said:

 Surprised that no one mentioned the fact that the NES classic used Pirates ROMs itself.

They're all licensed from whoever published [insert game] so no. 

[dexT]

23 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

What made the NES Classic a 'Killer Stocking Stuffer' was it's offical Nintendo branding and a retail price of $59.99 USD.

It wasn't worth the $60 let alone $300. GBA SP would be a better use of money.

[AshleyAshes]

Just now, dexT said:

It wasn't worth the $60 let alone $300. GBA SP would be a better use of money.

"Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it." -Publilius Syrus