To me, having to subscribe to a service to play a game is as bad as a streaming service. Once that service is gone, your games are gone.
Throughout the life span of the Switch you'll pay hundreds of dollars. Then when they shut the service down there go your games.
With Nintendo, their service is worse than Sony/Microsoft because their console started off with online play out of the bag with no fee, then charged for it later. And mother fuckers ate it up like a fat kid in a candy store.
Guy, you're being really shitty in this thread, and most of your arguments are pretty easily refuted. I'll start with this one. I'm on an NSO family plan for $35/year. We split it 10 ways, so that's $3.50/year. I'll never spend hundreds for their online service, and that's why their service is possibly a better deal for me than my PS Plus subscription. If you're not doing the family plan for NSO, you're basically doing it wrong.
Now let's talk about all your other arguments that I've read so far in this thread. I understand what you expect from an online store, and it took me getting to one of Nintendo's horses to get it from a horse's mouth why our expectation will never be met. You and I see shitty theft from a big dumb corporate entity, but what the current managers and executives over Nintendo's online platform see is money not worth investing to bring across old purchases or to offer you the games you bought for re-download. Those costs are not trivial when you consider that the Wii U's online service was really poorly written--so badly written that they abandoned it and went to an older project and started again from there for NSO. You can also assume some sort of ETL to bridge the old account purchases (which were linked to the Wii console and then ported to Wii U via console transfer). How much money should one expect them to invest to save our old purchases?
Sure, what they did was badly implemented from the beginning. At best, they could have offered some way to move those purchases over, and at worst they could have provided us some means of proving our purchases and they could re-sell it to us again at a discount or something. I dunno. Not even PS4 let's me access the shit I already bought that should already work but doesn't because licenses and shit. Whatever.
Finally, this bring us to another interesting caveat. All the content Nintendo makes available via NSO has to be licensed to be on Switch. It's the main reason that Wii U VC practically sucked compared to Wii VC. So, it's not like all your past purchases could magically appear on Switch without license renewals. A lot of SNES third party content is already available for purchase via legacy collections and such. Those companies don't want to compete with the old Wii VC and would rather just sell you a collection versus doing another Nintendo VC thing.
Last point and check mate (for me): I totally hated the way Nintendo handled the the virtual console. I hate the f'ing drip feed of it. I hate that it took like 3 or 4 years for the DKC games to even arrive on Wii U. I hate for them to treat each new batch of VC games like it's some sort of major release, and to then slap a price tag on it is just lame. As someone who makes daily use of his NSO subscription to play online, I'm glad that the drip feed is now just something I automatically get access to, like a gift. And I like that all of the games are just there for whenever I want to play. No extra charge.
I prefer this to the extra long wait, because at least third parties can go ahead and make their games available and Nintendo has a lot less back log to drip feed us with. With any luck/hope, they'll run thin on the drip feed by this time next year, and we'll get GBA or N64.
www.gamesradar.com
seven & halfish hours from this post.
