I honestly have no clue why a major manufacturer (especially Nintendo) hasn't made brand spanking new games for their old consoles. I know it is still sort of a niche market but anything Nintendo shits out these days is gold. Even if the "actual" market isn't large enough the resellers and scalpers will buy up the rest of the releases anyways.
Let's imagine some rough figures ...
A pro-developer is going to cost you around $100,000 per year, more for a really good one. Take a small team of 5, and give them 2 years (to produce a high enough quality game that Nintendo would put their name on - this is a
very low estimate for a Nintendo game) ... that's $1,000,000.
Let's add in say, another $500,000 in part-time management, office, HR, and other costs ... and in Miyamoto-san flying in a couple of times to steer the project.
Getting the cart manufacturing back up for a smallish run ... say another $1,000,000.
Throw in some marketing ... it's Nintendo, after all ... say $1,500,000 to round out the figures.
The carts/box/manuals themselves ... let's be
really generous and go with the Retro VGS figure of $8 cost.
We've already decided that it's a niche market, so let's go for a small production run of 60,000 carts ... that's another $500,000.
So that's a $4,500,000 spend ... so you'd want to project at
least $9,000,000 to have a reasonable ROI.
That gives us $9,000,000/60,000 = $150 per game.
That's Nintendo's wholesale selling price. Add in a 20% distribution markup and a 30% retail markup ... and that's $235 per game to the buyer.
Are there 60,000 people out there willing to pay $235 for a new Nintendo SNES game?
I don't know ... there could be ... would you?
