Source: IGN

In a recent press conference held in Tokyo, Nintendo let it be known that 7.8 million Virtual Console titles have been downloaded netting them 3.5 billion yen (or $33 million)! The apparently well-informed Nintendo executives went on to say, “We’re currently unsure if this is a lot or low. They’re not bad figures.”

Read more after the jump!

Umm…WHAT?! Do these guys even know what the Virtual Console titles are? As I mentioned before in my Good, Bad & Ugly trilogy a couple weeks back: I think the titles on the Nintendo’s Virtual Console are the biggest ripoffs in the history of videogames (except for maybe the NGage and UMD movies). Every single title sold is nothing but pure profit for Nintendo. There are no production costs, because these games were made 10+ years ago. The only thing Nintendo has to do is port them to the Wii hardware and make sure they run properly. The N64 titles might be a little tricky, but nothing that a good coder couldn’t handle during an afternoon of work. All of the others I bet it takes them an hour tops to do, and that includes a 15 minute coffee break.

About the only costs that Nintendo has to worry about with these Virtual Console titles is the bandwidth it takes to upload them when somebody purchases one. So for every $5-10 somebody spends buying a game, it costs Nintendo a couple pennies. How awful.

Since the Nintendo executives seem to be very clueless, I’m gonna go ahead and tell them the answer: These numbers are very, very high. $33 million of almost pure profit is a very good thing. This just convinces me even more that I need to learn Japanese so I can put in my resume for a Nintendo executive job.

(Side note: This information made me so angry that I had to bust out my ancient Excel chart-making skills. Aren’t you impressed?)

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