> It absolutely does. What do you think https://www.nicalis.com/ as a studio does? They take hobbyists' indie games, acquire distribution rights, and polish them so they can see console release.

They're not the games studio doing it, so it literally proves my point. These people could just as easily do it for the GB games too but they know there's no money in it.

> ...why not? I think you're setting your expectations too low. People pay for (polished) Steam and console releases of RPG Maker games; and those often have far less effort or thought put into the gameplay, replayability, etc. than these games do.

Because those games are cheap as chips and don't require an original Gameboy to play them. Given your point was about polished cart releases, the requirement to own a Gameboy is a pretty big hurdle for people who are only casually interested in retro games.

Then there's the other points I've already outlined: Gameboy graphics, much as I loved them at the time, haven't aged well. Even modern pixel art is very different to the 4 toned shades of grey on a 160x144 matrix.

> Though the real point of comparison that should be made, is the market for indie commercial homebrew releases for non-portable consoles; which is thriving even among non-retro-gamers, in a way that the market for portables, isn't.

Thriving is over-stating the market. There's a lot of resellers driving the prices up but the market for actual retro gamers is a lot smaller than the market bubble suggests. A lot of non-retro gamers bought their NES or PlayStation "mini's" but then went back to their current gen PlayStation/Xbox a few weeks later; leaving their retro system to collect dust. Even the emulators bundled with Nintendo's Switch Online membership mostly gets played by people who are already retro gamers, while the rest of the Switch's demographic prefer either Nintendo's first party games or the range of indie offerings.

And even if we take your comment at face value, you're still ignoring my point that the Gameboy has aged probably the worst of any console. Except maybe the Atari 2600. Don't get me wrong, I do love my Gameboy. But serious concessions were made in it's hardware design to facilitate it's long battery life. This made the device a fantastic handheld in the 90s but a terrible platform for modern gamers who aren't already bought into retro gaming. Sure you might get the odd non-retro gamer pick it up for nostalgia purposes (like with the NES Classic) but that's not going to be a sustainable source of income.

> Consider: there are more people out there commercializing just the ROMhacks of Super Mario World (by doing full engine rewrites of games that were already full asset replacements, to get away from Nintendo's IP, and then selling the results on console stores!) than there are GB/GBC/GBA game authors attempting to commercialize their games.

Are there? Do you actually have some data to back up that claim? Have you done any in-depth analysis here or just pulling guestimates out of your arse? And even if you are correct (which I doubt), what difference does it make? The two aren't related. They're not even mutually exclusive.

> Consider: there are tons of game streamers, speedrunners, genre-specific content creators (e.g. horror-game Lets Play-ers), etc, who play new console retro-games if and only if they come packaged in some accessible format. So they'll play Steam or console-store releases of these retro games; they'll play PC-accessible downloadables like Mario Multiverse or PokeWilds; but they won't touch a raw emulator. And, by-and-large, the developers of these new old-home-console titles are aware of that, and produce/port/polish their releases so that they can be consumed in this way, and so can generate virality. I don't see anything like that happening in the new old-portable games space.

There are absolutely shit loads of retro gamer streamers out there too. In fact I'm doing a stream myself tonight.

Disclaimer: as well as being a retro gamer and streamer myself, I know a number of relatively high profile people in the gaming and retro-gaming circles. Some who are resellers, some who are games researchers and some who are games journalists too. A couple of which are also really big fans of the GB, GBC and GBA so frequently get sent new games for review (albeit those games don't usually get published in magazines because, and I quote "not enough people are interested in the Gameboy". But they will publish reviews online).