Rebirth of The Sega Channel (or how I learned to stop worrying & hate the Revolution)

Almost ran out of title space there...

Anyway, for those who haven't seen it, IGN has information from a Revolution survey: http://revolution.ign.com/articles/680/680846p1.html

For the lazy:

• "the study highlighted three different pricing structures"
• "a subscription based package that would enable users to rent and play any game they wanted for $14.99 per month"
• "NES titles were listed for approximately $2.99"
• "N64 titles for a more expensive $19.99"

No further details on transferability or recoverability. I figure SNES games will be under $10. Overall, I think that they are asking for too much for single game downloads. The subscription could be where they make most of their money, but I think that it depends on how often they add to the catalog. Having had the Sega Channel for a long time, I can tell you that the lack of variety after a couple of months is what killed it.

 

yeah, read the article yesterday(?)
but I totally missed out the pricetag
I think $19.99 is way to much for the N64 games.. split that in half and it's more acceptable

 

If that would become 20 euro I think some people would be shot in Europe. =)

 

Are they crazy? Can someone explain to me why a single N64 title costs more than a month of service? I guess if you ran out of games to play 2 years from now, and just had to pay to keep the ones you've already downloaded it might make more sense. Hell for 20 bucks each, i could go out and buy most of the N64 library anyway! Nintendo has never been the same since that reorginization they did back in 2000...

 

Too expensive, but I'd pay £10/month to "rent" the games. More interesting is the list, It's missing some bloody big games - a lot of Rare (the company) games, Although a western release of sin and punishment would be nice

 

$20 for what ammounts to an n64 rom? For a game that you wouldn't even own a physical copy of id pay $10 tops.

 

I am curious as to how quickly the system will be hacked to play the rest of the back-catalog.

 

Heh. Not surprising in the least. Those who were hoping for 99 cent per title downloads are in for a rude awakening.

 

Wow so much for basically roms.

Sorry but even im not going to pay that much for a rom when i still have the originals in front of me. That games list is suprisingly small, theres hardly anything on that list that i already dont have in some form but this time round im meant to pay those prices & get no box or manual.

Only way ill go buying virtual games is if its got some drastically new extra content. Or unreleased games. Or even the mario artist series from the 64DD. Now that the revolution will be online they could emulate the randnet service like the N64 version, that would be cool.

Thing that concerns me is you wont even physically have a copy of your game so if your revolution goes tits up you might lose all the games you paid for, plus theres that other problem for importers (^_^) if its anything like the randnet service for the N64. Importers are probably going to have a real hard time signing up for the service outside of japan. You can gurantee that nintendo will do everything in its power to stop importers getting online access.

I think ill be just using the revolution for revolution games & the rest of my existing collection for the older stuff.

 

if they are charging that much for their own 1st party games, I hate to think what 3rd party games like goldeneye or Mega Man would cost..if they can even get them on.

 

If Nintendo ever has a problem with emulating some games into the Revo, they should hire all of those emulation authors. I'm sure they'll be as useful as that one serial burgular who became well known for making homes more secure after his jail release.

I'm pretty sure that would never happen...

 

I don't know, Hacker often grow up to get jobs in the security industry, so why not emulation authors getting jobs for Nintendo? They are the people with the right skills and such.

Yeah, 20$ for an N64 game is kind of pushing it. I could see $2.99 for an NES or $5-$7 for an Snes game. If they were smart they'd take this opportunity to release all the stuff that never made it over the the states.

I have no doubt it'll problably end up someting like Xbox live, like there's free stuff every now and then, but most of everything worth having you have to pay for.

 

In a perfect world for Nintendo where there were no evil emulators to torment them that pricing scheme might have flown. In the real world though where you can find full rom sets (which the Revolution won't even have) for free pretty easily I just don't see those prices working. Especially that $20.00 for an N64 game idea. What's with that? Did someone forget that they won't be on cartridges or something?

 

[Chicken Little]
And then they will have us move on to a completely subscription based game system where we don't actually own any of the games (or even the media for them) and we keep giving them a monthly fee just to be able to turn the system on.
[/Chicken Little]

 

its funny, but some of the emus sega used for some of their games actually came from emu authors themselves, one being giri giri. But i wouldnt be shocked if they did start getting people who make emus in free time to make a comerical one for them, but knowing nintendo and how secure they are about their stuff, theyd prefer to do it all in house. Still i was amazed on how well they did 64 emulation on gc.

 

Seems Nintendo has the same problem Sega does. They think ROMs/images of their games are worth more than what you can buy the real thing for used on Ebay. Morons.

 

i think we all forget that while these prices seem insane for us ,its not for everyday america.i work in a used cd/videogame/dvd place and people are more than happy to spend upwards of $40 on a original nes and a few bucks a game just to play some classics.when ive mentioned the revolution to customers they get very excited over the idea of downloading the nes,snes,64 games for a price.while it seems insane to us since most of us either have the games legally or via roms most of the people out there will be most likley sweep up in nostelgia.

 

How many of these people know about roms though? I'm betting that if you told them about what the Revolution is going to do and then mentioned that you could get the same thing for free right now online (even if you mentioned it wasn't legal) a good portion would ask you where?

 

This seems to be an on going trend now, has anyone seen www.gametap.com .
14.99 monthly charge for classic system, as well as DC stuff.