This Monday, the US VC will hit 100 games (that's why Zelda II is brought up). With the dozen at release, this works out to almost exactly 8 months to get a hundred games on the service. Let's assume they keep this rate up for the life of the console, and assume that it will have the normal 6 year lifespan. (5 years is actually the average, but since we expect Wii to "win", I'll give it an extra year of relevance.)
Over these six years, we get 72 months. Working in nice round numbers, this adds up to 900 VC games over the console's life span, assuming the rate remains the same and not considering any original downloadable titles. As a reference, NES had about 700 games, SNES had around 750, and N64 had just under 400. (PS2 had about 1500, and I can't find any reliable number for PS1, but that's probably even higher.) Point is, they've got enough material to pull from, but in time the VC may have more games than any of its source consoles, and maybe more than some modern consoles (XBox barely hit a thousand).
5
This Monday, the US VC will hit 100 games (that's why Zelda II is brought up). With the dozen at release, this works out to almost exactly 8 months to get a hundred games on the service. Let's assume they keep this rate up for the life of the console, and assume that it will have the normal 6 year lifespan. (5 years is actually the average, but since we expect Wii to "win", I'll give it an extra year of relevance.)
Over these six years, we get 72 months. Working in nice round numbers, this adds up to 900 VC games over the console's life span, assuming the rate remains the same and not considering any original downloadable titles. As a reference, NES had about 700 games, SNES had around 750, and N64 had just under 400. (PS2 had about 1500, and I can't find any reliable number for PS1, but that's probably even higher.) Point is, they've got enough material to pull from, but in time the VC may have more games than any of its source consoles, and maybe more than some modern consoles (XBox barely hit a thousand).