The best-selling piece of video game hardware in the US earlier this winter was not the surging Nintendo Switch nor the dominant PlayStation 4 — it was a miniature version of the Nintendo Entertainment System.
That’s the word from retail analyst NPD Group, which reports that “the NES Classic was June 2018’s highest unit-selling hardware platform, while the PlayStation 4 led the market in dollar sales” for the period between June 3 and July 7.
The NES Classic, which costs $99.95 and emulates 30 games from Nintendo’s first home console, launched in November 2016 to mass shortages as Nintendo underestimated demand. Although the publisher announced that it was discontinuing the device, it later committed to bringing the NES Classic back to stores in 2018. Starting on June 29, the system returned. And then it beat up all the other consoles.
Nintendo’s SNES Classic also became the best-selling console for the month it launched, in September 2017. There is still no word on a Game Boy or Nintendo 64 Classic.
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4 responses to “June’s Best-Selling Video Game Console In The US Was The NES Classic”
I’m surprised they are still selling at all. And no, I’m not being snarky.
Nintendo’s handling of the first Mini NES batch is so bad it not only hurt sales of subsequent batches, sales of the Mini SNES were impacted.
On the other hand, FOMO is still a driving factor. The unit itself is pretty underwhelming for me, with the games all having aged badly. But that doesn’t mean I’m getting rid of the unit I have. The SNES is substantially better though.
The way they handled it originally is why they’re still selling though. They were so hard to get hold of, that people who missed out are still keen to have one.
You also have people looking to get a second one to mod.
Maybe I’m just nostalgic but I got a kick out of mine – both versions.
Not to digress so far, I didn’t think I would get the Australian version so I actually bought the Japanese version from Amazon.
As luck would have it, I secured an Australian version as well.
But’s good as the Japanese version had the disk (non-cartridge) versions of some games. Mainly Zelda and Metroid. It was nice to compare the two.
While didn’t get too far, I enjoyed the better sound track on the disk (Japanese) versions.
But the real downer with the Japanese version thought is too much attention to detail. The original NES in Japan had its controllers hard wired and so does the miniature version.
They even scaled down the size of the controllers so they can be fiddly to use.
Oh, I got a kick out of the mini NES, I just found it got meh pretty fast. The nostalgia factor is high, and I got over the actual games pretty fast. Most of them have aged badly.
Now all it really does is sit there gathering dust. I don’t regret buying it in the slightest, but I really don’t use it.
With the mini SNES though, its not so bad. Mostly I think because the quality of games is so much nearer to mobile games of today that they compare favourably. Then the game quality comes through.