NES Classic Selling 1 Unit Every 2 Minutes At 500% The Retail Price Following Cancellation

Last week, Nintendo announced that it would no longer produce its wildly popular NES Classic mini consoles, which caused an uproar among fans. The game boxes were difficult enough to find when it was still in production, but the cancellation increased its value to gamers and collectors exponentially. The console is not only selling a unit every two minutes on eBay, it’s also selling at around 500 percent of the retail price.

In a recent report published by Polygon, the publication learned that eBay members have been going wild buying up every unit of the coveted Nintendo console that they could. According to the auction site’s representatives, some of their users are buying up to two NES Classic consoles every minute and are selling one for every two minutes.

What’s more, the current bidding wars for the consoles are putting the price of the mini console at $325 on average. That’s five times what it costs when bought at retailers.

Then again, considering that the consoles sold for about one unit per 18 seconds on eBay when it first launched, this really isn’t all that surprising. The sheer collector’s value of the NES Classic made it instantly appealing to gamers who felt alienated by the current generation and miss the good old days when they didn’t have to deal with micro transactions, DLCs, or Season Passes.

In any case, with the mini game box practically out of reach for most people, there are those who might be looking for workable alternatives. Luckily, the consoles themselves are based on Linux, which does make them rather easy to emulate. Ars Technica provides a rather detailed look into some of the options that retro gamers have if they want to scratch that annoying itch left by Nintendo’s scrapping of the NES Classic, including the use of the Raspberry Pi 3.