You don’t buy this to play the games. This is for collectors. And the price shows.
Right idea, wroooooong pricing.
Yes physical media is now on the upswing again. But it doesn’t get a novelty surcharge like a fucking current gen lineup.
You make it like 100, 200 and 500 you’re going to get way more gross sales. I can’t imagine inputs are very high for this, at all.
If I was them, I’d push hard with this with better pricing, and then work on a modern physical console with gameplay as the focus and graphics as the lowest priority.
That’s how you bring back the golden age of gaming.
At $250 for 10 games, that works out to $25 per game, which is already less than the usual going rate for physical releases of Atari 2600 homebrew games and licensed repros. That is, games for the system are already selling for more than this at a rate high enough to make it a viable business for some people.
On top of that, those current releases are typically a cartridge, box, and manual, and nothing more. This series of re-releases also come with fabric badges and enamel pins like the ones you could send away for back in the day.
Atari isn’t trying to create a new market for these products. They’re catering to an existing market, but it’s a market of which mainstream gaming circles are mostly unaware.
I can’t imagine inputs are very high for this, at all.
The tooling for the cartridges is probably only a few bucks a unit at absolute most. And most of that is in plastic injection molding. The entire 2600 memory stack can be condensed onto a microscopic IC these days as they werent more than 64kb in bank switching, and bringing the already developed code over is an intern’s weekend project.
This is a massive nostalgia-powered money grab.
Have you heard of F1? Do you know what it costs to just watch the F1 legally on streaming? have you ever wondered who goes to watch an F1 race when they completely shutdown a city for everyday people (like Las Vegas or Montecarlo), and how much the tickets cost?
It’s called value-based premium pricing, and companies couldn’t care any less about how much any of us think it costs to make the thing they are selling. They are simply charging the lowest price that their highest income target demographic is willing to pay. If you are not going to buy it, it doesn’t matter. You weren’t the target anyway. The people with tons of disposable income and a very high nostalgia induced perceived value for the cartridges are. You and I, we are rounding errors, we don’t matter. A single buyer is worth 20 people like you or me., they make up the difference by a long way.
Same way the F1 doesn’t care that Average Joe, or the other 100 thousand people like him, can’t afford a ticket for Las Vegas Grand Prix. The few one or two thousand high wealth targets can cover the difference. And they are not limited by living in Las Vegas or in Nevada. Wealthy people from all over the world will fly their lush private planes or first class seats to get there.
Same way free-to-play games don’t care about the complaints from the credit grinders. They only care to keep the whales happy. So on and so for. Value based pricing is the wet dream of CFOs and CEOs. It is the number one strategy that businesses turn to as soon as they have a captive market, it is the one they turn to when they are trying to maximize profits in a declining market, it is the one strategy that spears head enshittification. Why sell one million $1 copies when you can sell 20k $300 ones?
This is why “vote with your wallet” is a dumb thought terminating cliche. Your wallet-vote is worthless for companies, if on the other corner there’s a smaller, less vocal, but more willing to pay group. That’s why companies charge $100 for a download of a video game that might or might not work and don’t even blink when people complain.
All they gotta do is release an FPGA 7800. But instead they keep pumping out the system on a chip consoles.
Time to dust off my EEPROM burner!
Exsqueeze, for how much!?!!??!!
Like I get memory prices are outrageous but I could get a 512mb SD card with these games and the entire NES collection and emulator on an android device for less than $50.
$1000 for 39 games. Who has that kinda money in this economy?
There’s a small percentage of people out there with money, and every company is chasing them–to the exclusion of the rest of us.
Cool, but i already got those.
(⌐■_■)
Let’s see. The games suck, so that’s no help, they’re all uniformly terrible nobody wants to actually play them. You can readily buy actual copies of the original versions for about the same price, so they aren’t really collectible. Atari has very little cache among gamers (relative to say, Nintendo).
Who is this for again?
The games suck
You think Pitfall, River Raid, and Chopper Command suck?
Great games, I also loved Yars Revenge.
The 2600 versions? Yeah, I do.
