Goodbye Game Boy?

March 8th, 2007, 19:51 Posted By: wraggster

via gamesradar

Readers, let's try and work something out together. See, we went out and splashed a penny shy of $70 on a brand new Game Boy Micro last month, despite the fact we've already got another, ooh, five or so machines that can already play GBA carts. Why did we do this? Seriously, we want to know. After all, surely the Game Boy brand is deader than the much-neglected GamesRadar potted plant?

In a recent interview, Reggie himself conceded that there was only one more holiday season left in the Game Boy Advance, a glum forecast that still looks woefully optimistic when you consider Nintendo has dropped support for their smallest child like a hot sausage roll.

Additionally, the third-party publishers we spoke to regarding GBA support were non-committal at best. Only Square Enix seem particularly interested, with a few Final Fantasy remakes and a proposed sequel to FF Tactics in the pipeline - despite the fact that in December 2006, the GBA outsold the Wii, with 850,000 units snapped up. Clearly, the console itself does still have a future. And not just as a "gateway console" for younger players to buy, which the endless stream of depressingly conservative licensed cartoon-games seem to be geared at.

But if you walked into your local Best Buy and strolled over to the forlorn GBA department, you would be forgiven for thinking that's all the Game Boy has left to offer anymore. And it's understandable that, for all its success, people are abandoning the format. Greedy-eyed publishers look at the DS sales and see the larger margins, while smaller developers are often locked out because the prohibitive costs of the Nintendo license discourages some of the quirkier ideas from ever being more than a napkin scrawl.

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