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Why the NES Classic was Discontinued

2017-04-15
been a lot of Nintendo related news the past couple days mostly because we did have a Nintendo Direct just a couple days ago but the most interesting thing they announced was after that that Nintendo is discontinuing the Nintendo classic edition now this is baffling to people for a few different reasons first off the fact that Nintendo really didn't give any explanation whatsoever as to why they were discontinuing the system it was a very Curt announcement of just hey we're not going to make these anymore if you don't have one yet you should try to find one at the store but we know they've been under stocked so you probably won't sorry about that just kind of a matter-of-fact statement that doesn't tell us why they're doing it in the first place it's also worth noting that they're also cancelling the Famicom classic edition in Japan although that one had a slightly more vague explanation saying that it might be resuming sometime in the future it's not exactly clear second the system hasn't even been out for a full year yet and third and really the biggest reason it's been a success I mean these things have been selling off the shelves like crazy with not nearly enough supply to meet the amount of demand that's out there it's even been a scalpers paradise we're seeing them pop up on eBay and other auction sites well above MSRP which with the system getting now officially canceled you're now seeing prices as much as triple for these systems so why did Nintendo do this well obviously there's no official answer to this just yet but I had three kind of four theories as to why they would though all of them don't make entirely perfect sense then again Nintendo is company known to not always make the best business decisions theory one as insane as it sounds is that Nintendo did not want the classic edition to step on the Nintendo switches Thunder the switch has been selling phenomenally well and it's no secret that down the line it's going to have a virtual console like other recent Nintendo systems where you've a storefront and you can buy a handful of NES SNES gameboy games saw and so forth so if there's already this other little system out that has your favorite NES games on it you might not want to buy a switch for Virtual Console because that's why you would buy a switch in the first place it's kind of an insane logic reasoning but it's something that Nintendo has acted on before now the big Holness argument is of course if Nintendo knew they were going to do that with the switch why release the classic in the first place and if you did know you're going to do this why did the classic have it's under stock happening early on and instead just flood the market and disappear as soon as the switch came out it's just not an entirely logical business decision but once again Nintendo theory - Nintendo is that vindictive it is a long known fact that Nintendo does not like people messing with their brands whether that's modifying systems English translations the games that only came out in Japan fan-made games like Pokemon uranium or just straight-up piracy and of course to no one's surprise shortly after it was released the Nintendo classic edition was hacked and modded to play the entire NES catalog rather than just the small library of 30 games it shipped with and there was something that Nintendo absolutely hates mostly out of fear that it'll affect the sales of other systems now of course the normal logic would be that this was something that would inevitably happen some people are going to do it but you still have plenty of actual regular customers that are going to buy the system either way and sales will continue but Nintendo has always been very very vengeful in situations like this and after seeing some people have used the system take it away from everyone else now the third theory is the most optimistic one it's kind of a mixture of the last two but with the added idea that Nintendo cancelled the classic edition because they want to release something better in the future maybe it's true that they didn't like people hacking the classic Edition maybe they didn't like the response they were getting from some consumers from how the system was handled so they discontinued it in order to work our project that is an evolution and improvement something that does offer a digital storefront for expanding your games and not being stuck with just the initial 30 something that offers more than just NES maybe attacks on SNES and original Gameboy there's all kinds of things and it's something that could be released at the end of this year or sometime early next year but once again that's kind of the optimistic wish oh right theory for then Tendo hates money
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