 Dear Nintendo, first of all, I want to thank you. Seriously, thank you so very much for bringing Nintendo Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games to Nintendo Switch online. As a tremendous fan of the entire Game Boy family, I am thrilled to be able to play these games legitimately on crisp modern OLED displays and televisions. It's a real treat. Several of the games you've selected for this initial wave, Super Mario Land 2 and Warrior Wear in particular, are among my favourite games of all time. You can probably sense a but coming, though. But, and I am going to come across as incredibly ungrateful now, it's not enough. The Nintendo Game Boy is a fabulous platform with hundreds of fantastic games which has tremendous potential right now in 2023, which is mostly being squandered. Wasted. Nintendo, you have something special here and you are ignoring its potential. Game Boy on Nintendo Switch online is nice, but it could be so much more. Stick around, by the way, to watch me open some rare reprinted Game Boy games a little later in the video. Get ready for some hot seal raking action. First, I need to talk about the music industry. Last year, UK vinyl record sales overtook CD sales for the first time in 35 years. The last time vinyl sold better than CDs was 1987. That was quite a while ago. The vinyl record market has been growing steadily for the past 10 years, and while let's be honest here, this is more about the decline of CD sales than the rise in vinyls, rise vinyl has. In an era when music is primarily experienced through online subscriptions and streaming services, there's something inherently appealing about owning physical media. Vinyl may be dated technology and relatively very expensive, but these are features not bugs. Vinyl has won many hearts precisely because of the appeal of owning a tangible retro piece of music. Indeed, I see the same phenomenon with my own Nintendo Switch game collecting. While I've gone almost entirely digital with PlayStation games and stick to Game Pass if ever I'm touching an Xbox title, with the Switch, I much prefer to buy cartridges when the option exists. My growing collection of limited runs, strictly limited, and other short run Switch games is a testament to how I'll sometimes buy a game both digitally and physically, so strong is my desire to feel like I have something permanent, something that won't be erased when Nintendo inevitably turns off the Switch eShop. The timing of Game Boy games arriving on Nintendo Switch online is clearly not a coincidence. March sees the death of the 3DS eShop, meaning that it'll be no longer possible to purchase a vast array of Game Boy games digitally on any platform. Do you want to play Pokémon Red and see how the franchise began? Well, you've got two options, either Piracy, or buying a game secondhand. And secondhand Pokémon games are ridiculously outrageously expensive. Just as vinyl records have enjoined a renaissance specifically because they're retro and cool and old-fashioned, certain older video games have increasingly become collector's items. I've been going to retro game markets for years, I absolutely love them, but it's been interesting to see just how rapidly the prices for some of these games have been rising in recent years. Ever since the pandemic in particular, things have been escalating a little too fast for my liking. Clearly a wave of gamers took up retro collecting during lockdown, and, if I'm honest, things are getting a little bit out of hand. Too rich for my blood. Games I bought from pawn shops in eBay for £1 or £2 back in the day now sell for £20 to £40 online. There's a high demand for real, physical Game Boy media, and with these games unavailable on modern devices, it's not like there's any other easy way for newcomers to retro gaming to get hold of them. Well, there is. Of course there is. Nintendo, come on. We know you hate retro piracy. We know that you will sue a ROM archive site for $2 million in supposed damages, but let's be real. If you don't make these games accessible, if you give us less than 20 games across the entire Game Boy and GBA library on Nintendo Switch Online, then you haven't given people a lot of other options for playing these games. Plus, and I admit I'm getting sidetracked here, but how can a ROM site cost you $2 million if you don't actually plan to sell these older games anyway? Imagine a scenario in which vinyl records grow and grow in popularity, but the major publishing labels simply refuse to actually print more vinyls. Imagine the price gouging, the investor speculation, the painful bubble that forms around this kind of environment. Now, vinyl isn't a perfect analogue to Game Boy games because there's no one company that owns vinyl technology. You Nintendo could be making mint from simply restarting the old presses and producing fresh new copies of beloved retro games, or licensing the option for new publishers and indeed old publishers to do the same. You could be taking a cut of the entire Game Boy repro market if you wanted it. And obviously, while my particular bugbear amid the backdrop of the new Nintendo Switch Online editions is Game Boy, this is obviously also true of NES, SNES, and Nintendo 64 cartridges, and indeed GameCube, Wii, etc. discs that would cost literally pennies to reprint. My point is, there's no reason not to make the original versions of these games more accessible, to simply make the titles available digitally and physically for the benefit of collectors. After all, while you Nintendo may be weirdly reticent to let people play your older games, other companies are doing roaring trade by printing new old game cartridges. Limited Run is a company with a business model that, I don't love, what with its one-off timed pre-order window and penchant for selling collector's editions that are just a bunch of different types of cases in fancy packaging. But I have to admit, they are making Game Boy games available that otherwise would be prohibitively expensive. This here brand new copy of Shantae cost me, what, 50 pounds? An original cartridge from 2002 sells on eBay for over 700 pounds. By printing more of this game, Limited Run has ensured that more people can actually own this game physically without resorting to piracy. They also released it for Switch, again, on physical cartridge, because why would you not do that if you could? They currently have another game by the Shantae developers way forward up for pre-order, Extreme Sports, although this game isn't quite as expensive on the second hand market. My point is, whatever you may think of Limited Run as a company, this is a good example of getting older games out to the general public for affordable prices by simply printing more cartridges. Here's another one, Avenging Spirit, originally published in 1992, an original copy sells for 120 pounds on eBay. The modern re-release by Retrobit has this beautiful box and a glow in the dark cartridge. Ooh. Now in both of these cases, the number of additional cartridges produced has actually been insufficient to meet demand, leading to these jumping up in price on the aftermarket, but it's nothing compared to the cost of the original cartridges. Imagine Nintendo allowing your fans to simply stroll into game, the same way that music fans might wander into HMV. Browse a row of physical Game Boy titles and then buy a brand new copy of Pokemon Yellow for 50 pounds, rather than paying more than double that for a second hand copy from CEX. Apologies for the UK specific shop references, but you get my point. Also, yes, that's how I pronounce CEX. Anything else would feel silly. Imagine, similarly, if Retro enthusiasts could simply purchase Game Boy consoles, complete with modern IPS screens and rechargeable batteries, direct from Nintendo. Game Boy modding is an increasingly profitable business, as Retro collectors seek out the best possible way to play their old games. I'm personally in two minds about this. On the one hand, I don't love the idea of hacking up perfectly functional Game Boys, because each console that gets modded is another old handheld that's no longer being preserved in its original condition. As these modded handhelds keep changing hands for impressive amounts of money, unmodded Game Boys become increasingly rare. On the other hand, the screens on OG Game Boys do show their age, they could look better. The other solution is something like the Analog Pocket, a device intended to offer a premium modern Game Boy experience. This thing plays all original Game Boy cartridges and has adapters for Game Gear, Atari Lynx and Neo Geo Pocket Color handhelds too. It can also be used as an emulation device for piracy, but I'm slipping right past that. Again, though, Analog is a relatively small company and they are struggling to keep up with demand. Wait times for a pocket sit at around a year-ish. Current shipping estimates for a new order made today are simply listed as 2023, which could mean anything except January. Imagine a company that already excels at Game Boy hardware manufacturing, making a modern Game Boy available using all of their existing infrastructure to facilitate the delivery of these goods in a timely fashion. Remember the NES Classic? Remember how demand for retro gaming hardware took you completely by surprise, Nintendo? Remember how well the SNES classics hold too? Okay, sure, the Mario and Zelda Game and Watch devices didn't exactly fly off the shelves in the same way, but win some, lose some. In fairness, you could have popped a few more games onto these things. My point in all this is the Game Boy platform has so much potential, even now in 2023. Homebrew developers, third-party publishers and hardware clone manufacturers are doing their best to plug a gap in the market that's been left by you, Nintendo, not wanting to revisit the past for some bizarre reason. I mean, I get it. You're very selective about how you prioritise physical manufacturing. You make special editions sparingly so that they inevitably sell out and you're not left with leftover stock. You cycle through the amiibo you're stocking at any given time, much to the chagrin of collectors like my daughter, who just wants a Wind Waker Link Dagnabbit. A large part of your business strategy is refusing to commit too heavily to any one physical product, testing the waters but never getting more than your toes wet. A physical Game Boy revival would be a risky venture, even if the R&D and game development is all done already. But come on, Nintendo. This is Farante Craft, an Etsy seller slash Game Boy publisher who hand-solders each individual cartridge they sell, and they're selling some amazing modern Game Boy games. If you haven't tried Black Castle, seriously, give it a go, you won't regret it. Not to mention the fact that I can go on AliExpress right this second and order 10-20 fake repro copies of Pokemon Red from a dodgy Chinese company for the same price as one original authentic cartridge. Not that I would do that, because ordering gaming stuff from a dodgy Chinese manufacturer can get you into a lot of hot water, can't it, Nintendo? Hint, hint, see our video on Nintendo's toxic merchandise. But my point stands, if some of these smaller, less well-equipped companies can get new Game Boy games out there into the wild Nintendo, then perhaps you should at least try it. Because the demand is there. Maybe Game Boy games won't sell anywhere near as well as Switch games in 2023, but there's a definite proven, financially sound precedent for retro cartridges turning a profit in the modern era. And if all of that really sounds like too much work, then can you at least put a few more Game Boy games on Nintendo Switch online? Or failing that just maybe don't sue people for trying to share the games that you currently have locked in your super-secret Nintendo vault? That's all I ask. Anyway, I'm going to go play Super Mario Land 2's Six Golden Coins on my family's Switch OLED model, and I'm very much looking forward to how crisp it's going to look. This video was sponsored by absolutely none of the physical Game Boy publishers I've mentioned in the video. But if any of them want to send me free stuff, well, our channel's email address is open. Thanks for watching.