Luneth
Bob-omb
I have said previously, but I think this is the kind of deal for every third party game on NSO. That would explain why no third party game has left the service yet since it started in 2018, and also why we don't have a lot of third party games. One would assume it's much more expensive to have a game permanently on a service than just for a timed license. And as you said, NSO is not very expensive at all, and its value keep increasing (slowly but it does).The problem there is that, even though people think the Expansion Pack is very expensive, it really turns out to be like 4-ish USD a month. Now, if it’s royalty-based, a bunch of that already goes to Sega for Genesis, which is going to have way more nostalgia value for the worldwide audience than TG16/PC-E ever will, unfortunately. So they’d be carving out even more money for Konami, who would probably stand to make more money than Nintendo’d be willing to carve out for them by contracting M2 to whip up an emulator and selling the games themselves on the eShop.
To be fully honest, I would guess (because I have no way of knowing for sure) that Nintendo’s deal with Sega was a one-time, in-perpetuity cash deal for a number of games, with future options to increase the number of games licensed if they decide to give Sega more money. I don’t think it’s a royalty/sub-cost split, because again, $4/month/user is already paltry. If that’s the case, I can absolutely see them knocking on Konami’s door regarding licensing their games/consoles for NSO, but not until their currently available wells are dry. I agree they’re probably the best 3rd party on all available consoles and they’re clearly willing to play ball (see: Konami titles on Genesis NSO) plus the added benefit of PC-E (not going to be a big splash worldwide but Japan would like it) would be a visible value-add on that NSO+EP Splash Image they like to show. I just don’t think they’d make that deal now, because that’d be money spent on something they don’t need yet; they’ve got a number of first party N64 games left and GB/GBA are just getting started.
It's as we talked here previously about GoldenEye. Would Nintendo went through all the effort to unban the game on Europe (which I imagine it cost them money) and adapt it to the emulator it (this goes for Microsoft also) just for having it for a few years? I don't think so.