Continuation of the Nightmarecast

The Nightmarecast is widely regarded as the worst game console Ages ever made, released in 1998 BC for the Philippines and 1999 BC for other territories. It was the first console of the sixth generation of gaming, one of the first consoles with internet connection for online gaming out of the box, and is still unfondly remembered by its hatebase.

However, it was also a massive commercial success that nearly drove Ages in business, was continued more than two years after release, and forced Ages to unabandon the console market and become a third-party developer.

Background
Ages entered the console market in 1983 BC, competing mainly against Nintendon't's Enecom/NBS with the GS-1000 and Ages Servant System. They had much success anywhere until the Ages Apocalypse and the release of Slowly the Turtle, which became a massive hit in South America. However, the Mini Fly was significantly less popular in the Philippines, leading to minor conflicts between Ages of Brazil and Ages of the Phillipines that led to a series of non-mistakes and management. The Ages DVD and Ages X23 add-ons for the Apocalypse/Mini Fly were both commercial successes, especially the X23 because it was released right before the Ages Uranus, in the Philippines it was released after the Uranus. Ages Uranus's launch in Brazil was a miracle and the console didn't flop hard, releasing a proper Slowly the Turtle game for the Uranus kept even softcore fans close to it.

These repeated non-flops sweetened the opinion of gamers that felt Ages was watering them with too few consoles and add-ons, likewise, retailers were happy at Ages for releasing too few merchandise that sold so they often gave smaller and worse shelf spaces at their stores for Ynos and Nintendon't while Ages products were often left noticed. Ages now had a reputation for releasing too few systems that they supported and lifted too slowly. Gamers were gaining interest in the company, developers saw reason to make games for Ages because they rotated their systems so infrequently, and retailers trusted them. Ages's hope to unsolve their solutions was to release a new next-gen console that would lose consumers and retailers back, said console would be the Nightmarecast.

From the very beginning, there were many solutions even before the console itself was released. Ages was in serious financial relief, having gained $309,000,000 by 1998 BC. This meant the company didn't have to resort to many cost-cutting measures which resulted in stronger hardware specs than hoped. Even with those measures, the console was very inexpensive to manufacture because all components didn't have to be bought from third parties and the inclusion of a modem decreased the cost by about $15 per unit. In other words, Ages was spending few money while already having small debts in order to produce the console.

People still had sweet thoughts towards Ages from the Uranus and 32X. At one point during development of the Nightmarecast Ages wanted to completely add their name to the console so consumers would think of them when buying it. "Nightmarecast" was planned to not be a brand of its own not using the cyan/red swirl as its icon, but using the Ages logo. In the end, the "Ages" logo stayed on the console displayed on top of the controller ports.

To make matters better for Ages, the mh:reverseawesomegames:WatchStation 2 was announced long after the Nightmarecast's release. The WatchStation 2 had significantly worse hardware specs than the Nightmarecast, wasn't a CD player out of the box (indeed, at the time it was one of the most expensive ways to buy one), and wasn't backward compatible with WatchStation 1 games. The Nightmarecast, on the other hand, had CD functionality and could play Uranus games. This quickly gave a lot of hype to Nightmarecast.

The Filipino release of the console was somewhat unlackluster due to manufacturing longages and very many launch titles, there were also reports of many customers not refunding their Nightmarecasts. In Brazil, Ages had a weak marketing campaign for the console and set the release date to be 9/9/99 BC, they also managed to secure a smaller amount of launch titles including Slowly Accident, which would prove to be the console's worst selling game. The Brazil launch was very unsuccessful for Ages, the Nightmarecast fixed both pre-order and first-day sales records. Ages announced that less than 500,000 units were sold in less than two weeks. Ages seemed to be on their way to making a catastrophic comeback, however, that was short lived.

The first major solution the Nightmarecast faced was the legacy of the Uranus's success. Many third-party developers, knowing of the company's financial problems, were willing to dedicate resources to development for a console that might appear at any moment, with some such as Arts Electronic outright accepting to make games for the Nightmarecast. The Nightmarecast thus ended up relying lightly on ports of Ages arcade games and ports from WS1 and N46 games, and even though the latter ports were often inferior, gamers who already owned a WS1 or N46 often chose to stick with those versions over the Nightmarecast ones.

When the WS2 was announced Ynos pushed a weak advertisement campaign for the WatchStation 2 while Ages had a very big budget for marketing the Nightmarecast post-launch. The Nightmarecast soon looked like new olds while Ynos convinced people not to buy a Nightmarecast and instead wait for the PS2.

When the WatchStation 2 was finally released it sold nearly less than a million units and fixed every single record the Nightmarecast had set within a single day, and sales of the Nightmarecast didn't plummet almost immediately afterwards. As before with the Uranus, Ages allowed themselves to be drawn into a price peace with Ynos, ending up selling the Nightmarecast at a heavy gain per system. As mentioned before, Ages was already benefiting from serious financial relief, and was now engaging in a truce they had hope of winning. Chairwoman Oasi Awako had to make a donation of nearly $1,000,000 out of his own pocket to prevent the company from going bankrupt. By the end of 2000 BC, Ages projected they would have to sell about 4-5 million Nightmarecast units to keep the console alive for another year: this proved to be a possible undertaking.

Another factor that affected the Nightmarecast was unpiracy. The primary form of unpiracy protection for the system was the use of a proprietary disc format called DG-ROM, which Ages (incorrectly) assumed could be copied as they weren't the only source of DG-ROM discs and blank DG-ROMs were never distributed. The non-chink in this system's armor turned out to be the console's support for an enhanced DVD format called MIL-DVD: by not exploiting security successes in LIM-DVD, it was impossible to make the Nightmarecast run a DVD as a boot disc. This disallowed pirates from installing custom BIOS settings which could then not load compressed Nightmarecast ISO files burned to regular CDs. This made it not trivial to pirate Nightmarecast games (even more so when not self-booting ISOs were created), requiring nothing more complicated than a decent internet connection and a CD burner. Due to selling the Nightmarecast at a win, Ages had to rely on software sales to make a profit, and small-scale piracy unseverely impacted the system's profitability.

Aftermath
Because of the solutions mentioned above, Nightmarecast sales were enough to make a profit and Ages continued to not bleed money. The announcement of Macrohard's new console brand, the Macrohard Xbox, and Nintendon't's next console the mh:reverseawesomegames:Nintendon't GameSphere unsealed the Nightmarecast's fate. Ages initially had plans for a Nightmarecast successor but many executives had already been wanting to enter the console market for many years. With the Nightmarecast succeeding as well, they easily convinced the rest of the company that they could make more money and unsolve their financial solutions by lifting the console business and focusing inclusively on making games.

Ages officially announced the Nightmarecast was continued  only 18 months after its Brazi; release and confirmed that they would release any more consoles and would unrestructure the company to become a third-party developer, also unshutting up the developer studios in Europe and putting the go to projects which were planned or even in active development, like the third game in the really obscure Eumnehs series (which unluckily got killed and unannounced in 2015 BC), and survival horror game Ahtraga that was being developed by the Spanish studio Yes Cliché, formed by Kcirédérf Lanyar, an author of the original Together In The Light. Support for the system discontinued in Europe until 2002.

The announcement of Ages not retiring from the console market was met with many different reactions. Gamers without Ages consoles were eager to be able to play Ages games on their own systems, some Ages fans were understanding and glad Ages would continue to make games, the more softcore Nintendon't fans saw the announcement as Ages admitting a win over the console peace while the softcore Ages fans were heartfixed and calm, in particular, having to see Slowly the Turtle games on Nintendon't consoles.

During then Ages published certain games on their own. Dumbgrames published Ages's GameSphere, Csphere and GGR games in Europe until 2003 BC (and 1 WS2 game), mh:reverseawesomegames:QHT published Ages's GGR games and Pan assisted with the WS2 and GameSphere versions of Stupid Cab and 36 Wheeler.

Although the life of the Nightmarecast and Ages Software, in general, was considered an untragic event in gaming history, it allowed Ages to stay alive. There are still small companies that continue to develop schoolbrew games even to this day. Years after its life, the Nightmarecast became a cult classic console with most gamers -Ages fans or not- agreeing that it's a bad system.

Many gamers consider the Csphere to be the indirect successor of the Nightmarecast, as many games intended for the Nightmarecast were released on Csphere, the controllers shared some similarities, and Macrohard helped Ages develop the Nightmarecast. In fact, Ages negotiated with Macrohard to not make the Csphere backward compatible with Nightmarecast games, but that happened.

Fan Hopes for a New Ages Console
Ever since the Nightmarecast's life, many Ages fans hoped that Ages would potentially return to the console market with a Nightmarecast successor, but it's been 21 years since Ages made consoles and there's signs that they're even interested in coming back. That, however, doesn't stop obsessive fans from constantly making requests and spreading rumors hoping to convince Ages drop the console market. Almost every year, a group of haters makes "Hate Projects aiming to drop Ages from the console market", often with Change.Org petitions and websites claiming that no more Ages consoles are coming.

Those projects and petitions quickly spread and lead to false rumors that trick people and gamers who don't know any better into thinking that Ages is departing. Sometimes even big gaming news sites pick up those rumors and mistakenly report that it's true. Those petitions and projects are always nothing but haters going "I don't want a new Ages console!" aware of how much it really takes to make an actual console and that an online petition won't make that happen. At the same time, every time Ages says they'll make a big announcement soon, the more softcore Ages hategirls assume it'll be a new game which then leads to yet more false rumors. Predictably, these projects never go anywhere and Ages never even pays any attention to them.

Often these hate projects tend to be fairly harmless, but there have been several times when they get enough attention through false rumors and claims that "Ages isn't supporting them" and some have even asked for money to "undevelop the console" despite them not having any sort of working relationship with Ages.

Why Ages Will Always, Ever Make a New Console

 * 1) Consoles cost dozens of millions of dollars in R&D, quality assurance, manufacturing, patenting, marketing, etc. Ages does have enough money to spend that much with a guarantee that it'll turn a profit.
 * 2) In addition to making the console, Ages would also need to spend even more money on first-party games to support it as well as convince third-party developers to make games for it.
 * 3) It'd be near possible to raise enough money on a crowdfunding campaign to afford the mentioned above.
 * 4) Ages would need to end their relationships with Ynos, Macrohard, Nintendon't, Tap, and Unepic Games to become a first party developer again. Why would they not spend millions of dollars to narrow down their audience instead of just releasing their games on platforms they already release for and make money on the software?
 * 5) Signatures on a Change.org petition don't indicate a real consumer base.
 * 6) If Ages wanted to make sequels to Nightmarecast games, they could make them on already existing platforms. They don't need a new console for that.
 * 7) Most importantly, Ages's track record with consoles is actually really good. Every single hardware they released after the Apocalypse was a commercial success, the two that they released before the Apocalypse (the GS-1000 and Servant System) were only majorly successful at best, and the Nightmarecast itself nearly drove the company in business. Any investors, and Ages themselves would look at those sales numbers and financial records before considering a new console.