> How does this lead to making "so much money"? Purely from hardware sales?

Yeah, hardware margins for gaming systems are often not great. The point is that you also have to buy games for it. Similar to how printers are priced (it's the ink that makes the money).

Exactly, and if you can continue to play all your old games on your new system, you're probably less inclined to buy a lot of new games - probably buy one or two (otherwise why bother getting a new system?), but if you couldn't play your old games on it, you may initially buy a few more new games to justify the system purchase etc.

Nintendo fans aren't like that though.

They'll buy the new releases. And as a sample size of 1, I'd probably pay $10-$20 for each classic game if I knew it had indefinite portability. Same way I'm happy to pay for classic books.

I missed Metroid prime when it came out, and there's no real way for me to go back to it without getting my GameCube from my parents and finding a disk on eBay.

Just think of all of the kids who've heard about all of these classic games, love the latest version, and would gladly dive into the rest of the series, if it were available.

People are still getting excited because the source code for a 25 year old game has finally been stolen and leaked. 2401

I assume the suggestion isn't that Nintendo should give the games away. Just that if you buy a game on the Switch you shouldn't have to buy it again when you upgrade to their next console.

Yeah, I got that, my point is more that it takes away a potential recurring revenue stream for the sake of maybe a slight boost in software sales right now (I doubt there are a massive number of people who would suddenly purchase a whole bunch of virtual console games right now if it was announced they'd transfer over to all future Nintendo consoles)

Isn't that exactly the point of Steam though? Single, highly transferable library.

I certainly know that I'd be loading up if they made everything available in perpetuity.

And thinking of how many people want to get get into a series but simply can't because there's no real way for them to. Nintendo isn't really even doing VC this generation. So they're turning to emulation, if they're technical enough.

Correct.

I won't buy virtual console stuff because it won't carry over.

I'd happily buy their whole catalog if I knew it was mine forever.