Quote Originally Posted by Greg2600 View Post
Homebrew developers don't make any money on releases for old consoles. This would have been an avenue to sell thousands of copies at full retail, instead of a hundred. If it worked. Also, making money on the many digital play stores is also very difficult, due to the fees. You have to create a runaway hit. They should have just stuck to designing a system that played newly developed retro style games, cart based or not.
The thing is, newly developed retro style games aren't what people would buy a dedicated console for. Retro VGS had its wires crossed from the beginning. New games, retro styled or not, are happily played on modern consoles and through modern digital services because, as new games, that's where they belong. People will buy clones, flashcarts, and Retrons because they want to play actual retro games. It's a niche but a relatively lively one. Meanwhile, anyone who is into games like Shovel Knight isn't really thinking "man, I wish I could play this on a retro-but-not-really console built specifically for it." That's not even a niche--it's just plain nonexistent. As a vanity project, sure, I can buy there would be 50ish, maybe even 100ish, people out there who'd be game. But to think that it was something that could have been sold at retail, let alone afforded shelf space at brick and mortar, is just too preposterous to entertain.

This is really an issue of scale if anything. While many people thought the concept of the Retro VGS was crackers from the start, I think everyone would have given the project a hell of lot more slack if it had a much more realistic goal of selling a few dozen units to people who like kooky shit. Those people do exist and they did raise over $50,000. If this were framed as a personal dream, just to be able to say they made it happen and fulfilled the goal of producing something that would technically qualify as "a video game console" then this may have actually worked.