Nintendo's February showcase proves that nostalgia is big business | Opinion
Rob Fahey
Contributing Editor
Friday 11th February 2022
Nintendo
The first Nintendo Direct presentation for 2022 -- and arguably the first major showcase event for any platform this year -- seems to have been largely well-received by fans, but it's hard to deny that there was a slightly unusual tone to the announcements.
While new games did feature, a great deal of Nintendo's focus in this presentation was backwards-looking, a nostalgia-fuelled parade of re-releases, remakes, and reinvigorations of past glories. One could argue pretty convincingly that this is nothing new for Nintendo, a company that has always been very much at home with repackaging its past, but not so long ago we might have expected a showcase event that used re-releases of games and content from decades past as its tentpoles to be the subject of derision, not rapt anticipation.
What's changed, perhaps, is the audience, whose rising appetite for nostalgia and its willingness to pay for older titles is signalling something of a shift in the industry overall.
It turns out that old games really are both valued and valuable. It just takes the right approach and the right platform to make them profitable all over again
The key here is a demographic shift that's seeing the first generation of consumers for whom video games were truly a mass-market pursuit -- the people who were teens when the PlayStation and PS2 were in their prime -- entering their mid-thirties and forties.
This happened for the SNES / Mega Drive generation some years ago, of course, and it spurred a wave of interest in retro or faux-retro titles harking back to that era. But those systems were never a part of mainstream youth and young adult culture in the way that the PS1 and PS2 were, and the
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
