I don't know what to do with this feeling of anger towards Nintendo. It's very clear that their closure of the eShop is to wipe the selection of (mostly older) games they have and force people to subscribe to their fragmented, at-whim Switch Online service.
I don't know how to put it concisely, other than it sucks and they're an awful company that's antithetical to the family friendly image they'd like to present. Greedy, soulless ghouls. Fuck em.
Bleh
apropos of nothing, i found installing RetroPi on a CanaKit very rewarding. the ui is customizable, metadata is easy to retrieve, and managing a collection of ROMs is as easy as dragging them into a directory from any computer on the same network. the hardware isn't well equipped for n64 games, but ps1 games play just fine, and i was even able to play through fan-translated romhacks of breath of fire 2, final fantasy tactics, and mother 3.
obviously not a solution to the nintendo problem for everybody, but it could be for you.
There have always been solutions to playing old games where the hardware is becoming difficult to get or maintain, but I think the number of companies doing extremely limited library retro re-releases, and closing down platforms that are multiple layers of backwards compatibility as well as their own native titles, is going to cause a surge of new tools that are designed to take all the progress made thus far in emulation and make it very easy to use for less technical users.
This is ultimately good news for everyone. It's sad to see a platform EOL but there's hope in having an active preservation community and watching them get to work.
I honestly believe that Nintendo just. Hates making money.
Like Metroid Prime Remastered slaps, I (and many, many other people) would have happily paid $100+ for a physical collector's edition. But they didn't do that. They didn't even let you preorder the game. They just. Dropped it one day. And, even worse? The game was apparently done and ready for 2 years. Which is a TON of time to figure out merch and supply chain stuff!!! But they didn't bother because they don't want to make money.
Look at that Mario collection they did, which had 3 older 3D Mario games bundled together, and they were only selling it for a few months. Why did they stop? No stated reason, they just. Decided to stop selling it.
This isn't a situation where they literally no longer have the source code lying around and would have to make some obscure game from scratch. It isn't that they no longer have the rights to publish these games, or they lost the license to the music in it or anything like that. Nintendo can drop any of these things, at any time, and people will happily buy this stuff again. Lord knows I've bought Ace Attorney, like, 5 different times now.
The whole point of a company is to make money. They do whatever they have to to sell the most stuff at the lowest cost. Keeping up servers and services for old devices that are no longer being sold or even really played is costing them more money than it's making, shutting down the 3DS and WiiU shops makes (business) sense. But re-releasing those games on the Switch, and for money, will make them money. Letting people pre-order the Prime remaster would have made them a lot of money. Letting people buy those Mario games, or the old Pokemon games, or anything is in the best interest of the business.
And yet they never do. And the only explanation is that Nintendo just hates to make money. But I have no idea why that is. But this has been true for years and years, well before you could blame covid or "the supply chain" for problems.
