I sometimes wonder why you guys get so upset by some of these prices. New game machines from the majors are $400 now, and those are all shat out of a robot in quantities of tens of millions. Controllers are now $70 after tax. How well will an Analogue NT hold its value? I don’t know, but I have a mint condition XBox 360 here with like 20 hours on it that I can’t even GIVE away so I’m thinking probably better than most new machines.
You try making something in a non-volunteer/scenester capacity where profit, or at least breaking even, is necessary to keep the place open and see what the final price tag says after a whopping 115 people put down a deposit.
Look, I’m an OEM-only kinda guy when it comes to video games, pretty much. They made the best gear and the truest experience and that’s generally all I want, personally. I currently have no need for this stuff. When I want to play games, I reach for old plastic from SNK, NEC, Nintendo, and Sega. HOWEVER, in Medical Weed’s crazy (mostly deleted) garbage posts there was one thing I think was a genuine good point. He mentioned (I’m paraphrasing here) that when a billion dollar company aims a product at rich a$$holes you don’t have a problem but when it’s like a three man team you start a f*cking campaign against it.
The PC Engine LT was basically $1000 when it came out. On a good day in 1992 you could buy a new car for $4k. The price of a Laseractive (before it was eventually reduced to $70 or whatever) made the LT look cheap. In the “basic” SuperCD system was $400-1000 depending on configuration. Then there is the Supergrafx which is probably best described as “ripoff” since it was $500, basically a $100 fee for each game made for it since anyone buying it probably already had a PCE. And when you look at the timing of things it’s pretty hard to buy that didn’t NEC know the SGX would never have ten games of its own when they sold it. They cancelled the system themselves and then charged twice the price of a regular system.
And we all love all NEC machines and want every one of them (well, to varying degrees...) despite the actual build quality being...well, really good, but they sure don’t have alloy cases and gold tipped connectors and chips physically robbed from other systems by hand one at a f*cking time...
So why is it we all love sucking the cocks of giant corporations but any individual that tries to develop a product suffers from the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner problem...that is, it’s “OK” but only if the individual is essentially morally perfect, possess at least one advanced degree, and comes with a list of references to prove it?