I don’t think we’ll ever see an extensive “Netflix for games” service for older platforms, from any company, because the rights are such an ongoing nightmare. This stuff works fine for movies and their five or six major companies handling distribution for most major films in a given country; it’s much harder when you’re trying to deal with fifty companies, many of which haven’t existed (or haven’t operated as video game publishers) for decades. It’s the No One Lives Forever disaster, times a thousand.
We could see such a service for first-party Nintendo games, but they’ve never been known for devaluing their back catalogue, and because it’s Nintendo, people would complain about it being too expensive at any price point short of free.
Sure, it’s reasonable that given the failure of the WiiU, that they didn’t expect the switch to sell that well.
All I know is that for months, I couldn’t buy one. They probably would have gotten more money from me through game sales throughout the year if there had been enough units so that I could have bought one.
Classic Game Selection*
Subscribers will get to download a compilation of classic titles with added online play, such as Super Mario Bros. 3, Balloon Fight and Dr. Mario.
Yeah, in the past they suggested that you would get one game, per month, and at the end of the month you’d lose access to it.
I believe they walked that back at some point, since folks were like, “WTF?”, but it’s still somewhat nebulous as to what Nintendo will actually give users.
Honestly, they could make it amazing if they wanted to… and I’d have zero problem paying a monthly fee for it, even if I never used the online play component, if it came with some reasonable chunk of Nintendo’s classic library. Most of them aren’t games I’d even want to play that often… maybe just once in a while, for nostalgia’s sake.
Yeah, I have Game Pass. It works because the stuff it covers isn’t a licensing nightmare for the most part. It’s the same reason a potential Nintendo service will probably stick to first-party titles.
Yes they explicitly walked back the idea of one game per month that you lose access to, and instead suggest on their web site that it will be more like Game Pass is.
$20/year for access to a classic collection is pretty reasonable if that subscription also includes a bunch of other stuff they allude to on the site. Maybe there will be a Nintendo Direct soon which talks about it.
If only that were the case. Sadly, as shown when Irem’s entire catalogue was removed from the Virtual Console and just about every other digital-distro service, the rights for all those things are held by the actual IP holders, same as everything else. (It’s also why there’s no official rerelease of the original arcade Donkey Kong, which Nintendo didn’t develop and doesn’t retain the rights to the original code for - the version in Donkey Kong 64 was coded from scratch and isn’t arcade-accurate, for example.)
Sweet, I can finally remove that game from Wii backlog (through backwards compatibility for Gamecube games). I bought a Gamecube controller just for that game and the cel-shaded Zelda game. One day I’ll get to them, the deluded me from 2007 was thinking. Wind Waker is also on Switch now, right? So maybe I can throw away that horribly uncomfortable Gamecube controller.
Chibi Robo is a weird little franchise-that-couldn’t, and one of my favorite GameCube games. Its also the only amiibo I own.
It’s had a couple of odd handheld titles recently, but the last “real” game on the series was 2009, if you’re generous, as even that was a handheld game. It would be quite a surprise if they had anything to announce there, but he’s real real cute, so it makes sense for Nintendo to just keep him around as a mascot.
