Are Plug and Plays Dead/Saturated Market now?

[Atari Pogostick]

EXcept most of those plug and play systesm sold at mall kiosks back in the early 2000s were illegal bootleg famiclones. The guys peddling those systesm did not ahve a right to the content contained within.

Eh, no they were not, that's why I specified mid 2000's. The NES clones were the cheap ones, the ones in the mid-2000's were actually made by companies that had an actually history of you know, existing unlike the Nintendo ones which were LLC's or the likes that only existed with a year before. The ones that gobbled up so much money ot made companies go out to get official licensees for theirs.

[Tanooki]

 

Of course,

 

And yes we have an Ex-Hyperkin product dev on our team. I know which chip you are talking about and that was the factory we were going to use for chip based consoles.

That's great news, now consider me really interested. I received a Supaboy S during the week and that chipset is blowing me away just how compatible and great it is. I kind of mini broke it down in that reactivated Supaboy S thread since someone asked for a teeny write up.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Eh, no they were not, that's why I specified mid 2000's. The NES clones were the cheap ones, the ones in the mid-2000's were actually made by companies that had an actually history of you know, existing unlike the Nintendo ones which were LLC's or the likes that only existed with a year before. The ones that gobbled up so much money ot made companies go out to get official licensees for theirs.

 

I hear what you are saying. These were literally at every mall in 2004:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Player_Super_Joy_III

 

Noac clone chips were not legitamized until 2003 after Nintendo's patents on the Famicom expired.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System_hardware_clone#Post-patent_Famiclones

 

Generation Nex by Messiah got sued by Nintendo but Nintendo lost. The wikipedia article states that Gametech's PocketFami got sued by Nintendo but Nintendo lost the suit (citation needed). IIRC, it was Messiah that got sued by Nintendo and won the case. Despite this, they went bankrupt in lawyers fees, however it opened the floodgates to cloned hardware using this technology. Unlicensed plug and plays with built in ROMs were still very much illegal despite the fact I've seen malls selling them as late as 2010 and beyond.

 

Recently more arcade companies have been licensing recreations of their games using legitamate arcade roms, nes roms, or custom ports on embedded hardware. The current trend seems to be miniature arcade recreations of wildly varying build, hardware, and software quality, but I am glad to see arcade games in the spotlight again. Nintendo isn't going to license any of their own ip to third parties for as long as they manufacture console hardware, and that's okay by me. Donkey Kong and Mario Bros are available on Switch VC er Arcade Classics, with more coming. I've been meaning to try out Sky Skipper.

[derFunkenstein]

I would say based on all the info here, AtGames is betting that PnP games are not a dead market.

 

https://fccid.io/2AMTQ

[Spike Danton]

At Games...

 

See here's my thing with the Plug N Play scene, there are many companies with games that haven't been re-released numerous times that could put out some profitable Plug N Plays. Nintendo have shown us this with their NES and SNES mini.

 

However, I think Atari and Sega have over-saturated themselves. How many times can we play Sonic,Thunder Blade, OutRun, Vectorman, Pitfall, Kaboom, Riverraid, Asteroid before people start losing interest? We've had Sega and Atari re-releases for around 20 years now, multiple retail compilations, digital compilations, numerous Plug N Plays, stand-alone releases, authorized emulation sites, portable gaming console compilations, not many people are interested anymore.

 

Atari and Sega likely will never see similar success to a NES mini because they have both run their wells dry. Outside a Jaguar/Dreamcast mini they really don't have anything to tempt someone to buy their Plug N Plays in my opinion.

Edited September 15, 2018 by Spike Danton

[Eltigro]

However, I think Atari and Sega have over-saturated themselves.

 

I'd add Namco to that list... how many Pac-Man PnPs are there?

[Pixelboy]

Atari and Sega likely will never see similar success to a NES mini because they have both run their wells dry. Outside a Jaguar/Dreamcast mini they really don't have anything to tempt someone to buy their Plug N Plays in my opinion.

I think a Lynx re-release with 20+ of the original games built-in would attract some attention. Battery life would certainly be better on that system with current commercial technology. The Lynx has a lot of good Atari-published games, so it would be worth buying, IMHO.