The company’s dedication to retro authenticity goes far beyond creating desirable gaming hardware.
The company’s dedication to retro authenticity goes far beyond creating desirable gaming hardware.
Sure, Analogue also caters to scalpers, to a point.
Somewhat /s, I guess?I love my Analogue Pocket, which I’ve had for a little over a year, and Dock, which I’ve gotten maybe a week ago but has already surpassed my (fairly mild) expectations. I’ve also had a Super Nt for over a year and have a pre-order in for the Duo, so I tend to appreciate what Analogue comes out with, but their recent strategy with limited edition Pockets feels a bit ill-intentioned.
They had seemingly finally caught up to production issues and were able to deliver everyone’s orders towards the end of August and suddenly made both regular editions of the Pocket unavailable to then “drop” limited editions a few weeks later.
Those are once again hard to get, unsurprisingly slightly more expensive than the “regular” variant and generate a significant amount of demand for very limited quantities.I might be reading too much into it, but it feels like they’re still trying to cultivate a constant feeling of FOMO and/or limited supply around the Pocket, all the while being finally able to catch up with demand (I fully understand production was not at scale compared to how much demand there was for it back in 2021/2022).
That’s a good assessment.
For anyone unaware, you can get a Slate kit for the GBA SP for about $100 less (provided you have an SP lying around), and it can play GBA, GBC, and original Gameboy carts. If all you’re looking for is the form factor and general retro gaming, there’s other options out there.
Yeah, I see them as the Teenage Engineering for retro hw. They both have an Apple flavor to them: create a unique, highly polished designed, and use scarcity to sell the product.
As a small batch hw company, that’s definitely the safer route to go, vs over-producing your niche product and then not being able to sell them all.
I just wish they’d actually deliver on promised features instead of this profit pumping FOMO bullshit.
It’d be nice if they could release a lite variant for those who just want to play Game Boy games.