I’ll never understand why Nintendo doesn’t do a subscription to play any old game older than say three generations.
Nintendo is in the best position - since they never focused on specs all of their consoles are easily emulate-able.
There’s really no excuse. Even from a revenue perspective I’m confident they’d make more money this way. Make it so it works on any device - again Nintendo can do this because the consoles don’t require great computers to emulate.
You probably could run 100 gba emulators simultaneously at 120fps on a modern commodity desktop.
I learned about this when I read the book "Console Wars"
Nintendo has always been all about artificial scarcity and increasing their products' value that way, ever since the early 80s
If Nintendo put out a subscription service with 3500 games, it would de-value all those games in the long run even though it might earn more revenue for the next few years.
When you think of "Playing a long game" when applied to a tech company, you probably think "longer than the next year". Maybe you think "the next 5 years".
Nintendo was founded in 1889. They are for sure playing a long game measured in decades. They definitely don't obey the same "laws of physics" other console manufacturers seem beholden to.
It's unwise to think Nintendo is acting out of ignorance.
> It's unwise to think Nintendo is acting out of ignorance.
Their repeated failures in the online space makes me think it's at least a little bit of both greed and ignorance. They just don't seem to "get" anything once the internet gets involved. When it was all playing cards and game cartridges they didn't have to worry about building a sensible online account system that could handle purchases and game content being accessible worldwide and supported from one Nintendo console/device to the next.
The world, the internet, and the expectations of players have changed and Nintendo seems to have lagged behind. It might all be some super well planned and calculated move by savvy Nintendo execs to piss off their customers and deliver a shitty experience in order to maximize profits, but I doubt it.
I play a lot of SSBU online and it works well. Rollback netcode would be a huge improvement, but the game is definitely playable. Online play clearly isn't a focus for Nintendo, but it's hard to argue with their success. Perhaps their focus on building self-contained experiences is part of their secret sauce.
Honestly the fact that you don't have many complaints after less than five years is a good sign, but tell us again in 10 or 15 years how well your online SSBU games are going.
I'd actually be okay with it if Nintendo just came out and said that online wasn't something they were interested in. I'm one of those people who is perfectly happy with physical media, single player, and local multiplayer.
It would have spared them a ton of trouble with things like the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection Service, DRM, friend codes, eShop, Randnet, Nintendo Network, DLC, WiiConnect24, the wii shop, even Pokemon home/bank, etc. and they could have just kept on delivering gaming experiences that worked for players no matter what servers were offline, kept on working for decades as long as you had a disk/cart and the right console, you'd never have to worry about your purchases being pulled out from under you, and all of it could be lent/traded/resold/handed down freely.
Very few consoles, let alone games, last 15 years. Requiring an online experience to work well for 15 years, while nice, is not a realistic requirement for a majority of games.
> Very few consoles, let alone games, last 15 years
The PS3 is older than 15 years! The oldest console in my home right now is an Atari 2600 and that's 45 years old and works just fine, as does its games.
Same with the Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, One of two original gameboys, most of the rest of the gameboy and DS lines, SNES, N64, Gamecube, the PS1, one of two PS2s (disk read issues on the larger one), and the PS3. all their games still work.
Honestly, the consoles and games that don't still work are the exception. One original gameboy has a blank line along one side the screen (still pretty playable), The NES still works fine, but some of the games don't save anymore (battery needs replacing), same problem with some of the later gameboy carts. If some of the SNES games have that problem I haven't run into it yet. Several controllers, joysticks, and DDR pads have died over the years and had to be replaced though.
I have a harder time getting PC games to work (on modern hardware) than I do getting console games to work. I expect I'll be able to hand most of this stuff down and the kids will be able to do the same for their own kids with many of them before they stop working. With maintenance (which I've never done for any of them) they could last longer. The PS2 with disk read errors and the dead batteries are totally repairable.
I suspect that the PS3 and PS5 will die sooner than most of the older consoles. They really don't make them like they used to. I blame higher running temperatures, lead-free solder, and cheap capacitors.
Nintendo is a public company and wants what its shareholders want. That's why they had to ditch the WiiU entirely when they briefly stopped being profitable.
Shareholders want long term growth? I don’t see how being public makes Nintendo’s strategy any less true or any less good. It is generally profitable and does work as a strategy to increase stock value.
Nintendo being generally profitable seems like short-termism to me - Microsoft sells the Xbox at a loss to generate later sales, Amazon avoided profit for years and years. Nintendo doesn't sell anything at a loss.
Anyway, they're not family-owned like they used to be, so I don't think comparing them to when they were a private company is all that useful.
There is also the issue that most of those 3500 are never going to played for more than 5 minutes and will just be there as a curiosity.
There are the classics still worth playing, and the cult titles that hit some nostalgia button for a significant number of people. Beyond those it's just not worth it for Nintendo to even format a jpeg of the box art.
Personally I prefer a curated list with the scans of the manual and some history behind the game like they provide now. Otherwise you are in decision paralysis looking at 1000s of titles with no clue which is worth your time.
Them trying to ring out more money on top of the base Switch Online subscription for N64 games is my main issue. If they had not done that I would likely have subscribed again. The drip feed is a little too slow also, but I don't have the free time anyway so it's not a deal breaker.
As it stands I'll wait for my Steam Deck and not be able to decide which ROM to play on there ;)
I think my whittled-down NES ROMs dir that included probably a dozen games that aren't very good but have strong nostalgia value for me, plus a couple Japanese games in unofficial translation, ended up being around 80 entries. I'd probably cut that down to about 50 if I were setting something up for someone who wasn't around back then. SNES comes off a little better but my curated-for-others list would probably be around 70-80, including quite a few translated games.
Part of it's because a lot of "greats" have better versions elsewhere (arcade, for games like Mortal Kombat, Gameboy Advance in a lot of cases especially for RPGs, et c.) and part of it's because there was just a lot of crap on them (I think the NES had over 1,000 distinct games).
I think Nintendo knows that people don’t actually care that much about playing game boy games. They are boring and unpleasant by todays standards but they hold a strong nostalgia factor. So they drip out bits of content and sell it at a high price while a subscription service would just remind everyone how little they care about playing very old games.
And also de-value the newer games and/or remakes, I for one tend to buy "The newest zelda" if I'm itching for any zelda game, but if I had easy access to 10 older zelda titles that'd be it
This checks out. Nintendo really only seems interested in using their back catalogue to create a value offering when they are struggling to sell hardware. Hence why a lot of first party GameCube and Wii U games got reissued in $20 "Players Choice" SKUs late in their respective console's lifecyles while they Wii and Switch launch titles have remained full price.
I believe Disney did this with its films over the 80s and 90s. People built collections of these VHS tapes in big plastic boxes, it was a thing for an "old" film to get a release.
Good example. It doesn't really make sense logically to collect these (i.e., vs. just renting them). But I think I understand emotionally why people would want to collect things like this.
Availability. I stopped buying video discs when Netflix's streaming catalog felt like it was going to expand to everything, and well also when Netflix by mail seemed good (and that really did have almost everything), but once you hit enough things that you saw and wanted to watch later that weren't there when you wanted to watch... You start collecting them, so you know you'll have them.
> Availability. I stopped buying video discs when Netflix's streaming catalog felt like it was going to expand to everything
And just think, now it's smaller than ever.
I went over my Amazon Prime Video watch history recently; almost nothing on it is still available. They even managed to somehow lose the rights to a decades-old low-profile Chinese film.
> If Nintendo put out a subscription service with 3500 games, it would de-value all those games in the long run even though it might earn more revenue for the next few years.
It also might expand the fan base loyalty to their valuable IP franchises.
I know there's a bunch of Nintendo nerds on HN that would play emulated games on their switch but how many switch owners actually want to play old games? There's a lot of kids out there that like playing new games that have modern graphics and gameplay. There are plenty of handheld or console devices out there that can emulate old games but none of them ever sell that well. Nintendo has spent some resources developing the emulators but it likely died when they realized it wouldn't sell that well and that many games would be unavailable unless Nintendo felt like relicensing games from publishers that are owned by competitors.
I remember the games had to be ordered via catalog (toys r us, jc penney) and took 6+ months to arrive.
Blockbuster ate their lunch with rentals. BB and Hollywood Video went to town on this with the SNES with guaranteed in stock new games for rental.
On the switch Nintendo charges insane prices for re-released (read- emulated and poorly). If you want to play their shitty emulation of an N64 game it's like $70 US/year.
Publishers want to get to the point they charge us per minute played or per boot.
I'm over Nintendo, and I once cherished my complete collection of Nintendo Power mags with all alternate covers.
I pay for Nintendo Switch Online, which includes access to a handful of games from the NES and SNES consoles. If I want to pay more I could also get access to games for N64 and SEGA Genesis (SEGA Mega Drive outside of North America if I'm not mistaken).
I would have to assume (may not be correct) that Nintendo Switch Online will roll over to their new console(s), albeit under some other name, including the emulation software and game access.
You mean in that you can not play the Virtual Console on Wii anymore. (It does help to point out that they can choose to end the service whenever they want.)
It is still a point that the games which were made available on the Virtual Console could still simply be made available on Nintendo Switch Online. It seems to me that the Virtual Console for the Wii (in effect) became the emulators that were made available with Nintendo Switch Online.
That's the standard every other platform has moved to. If I buy a game on the play store I can use it on any android I own. If I buy Banjo Kazooie on the Microsoft store I can play it on my 360 or Xbox one or series x and probably the next five consoles Microsoft puts out. Nintendo's rabid anti-consunerism will bite them one day.
Historically, porting console games from one to the next isn't always the easiest task since the hardware is so specialized. I think it's been fairly easy for Microsoft because they basically just put out a standard PC every console generation, and their controller design has been pretty much exactly the same since the beginning. But Sony and Nintendo have had some weird hardware. The PS3 was infamously difficult to develop for because it had some wacky architecture under the hood, and we've only recently seen somewhat capable emulation efforts for it.
And Nintendo's in a particularly weird situation where even if it wasn't just the underlying architecture, the consoles all have some kind of "gimmick" where you couldn't really play them on a different system without rethinking the entire game. Like, if you bought a Wii U game digitally, the game was designed around being played on a TV with a secondary resistive touchscreen controller. How would you play that on the Switch, where you only have one screen which may be either on the TV or handheld, and it's capacitive instead of resistive? Nintendo has ported some Wii U games to Switch, but they involved manual work to change how some stuff works. Same with when they port Wii games to it. Super Mario Galaxy was made for a Wii remote and nunchuck, and had a lot of motion control gameplay elements that had to be redesigned to work on Switch.
Historically, porting console games from one to the next isn't always the easiest task since the hardware is so specialized
Yeah, it's tough when the consoles have roughly comparable performance. When they don't it's less so. Amateurs without access to source code got the Dreamcast to run Playstation games better than the Playstation. They got the PSP the run N64 games. They've gotten the Switch to run everything from the Dreamcast down. It's less work than that for internal developers; Nintendo basically made an N64 emulator for the Gamecube as a lark just to offer a free pre-order disc with Wind Waker.
Yea I was also sort of pointing to the fact I can't play any of those games I had to purchase on Wii virtual console unless Nintendo decides to release them via Nintendo Switch Online - of which I also pay for.
Why would they did that when they can make more money porting the games, touching up the graphics and rereleasing them as "new" games every generation?
3 generations is GCN and N64, last I checked emulation of these is still not a fully solved problem even on highly speccd hardware. Their existing subscription service does emulate systems older than that, but the limited selection of titles is I think an unfortunate necessity of the licensing.
They're still kind of flailing with their entries into the mobile game space so I can see why they would be hesitant to jump into the PC software world, this is not a core competency.
Albeit with a limited library (Although I'd say nearly every game worth playing is already on there, besides a couple N64 games). For reference, with the Switch Online subscription you get
* NES
* SNES
* N64
* Sega Genesis
I guess you could argue that Gamecube isn't represented yet, but that's the only major out of date system that isn't included (Understanding that almost any game playable on the WiiU is also on the Switch).
You don't get N64 or Sega Genesis with the basic Nintendo Switch Online subscription, you need to go for the more expensive "Expansion Pack" subscription to get those.
The N64 library is quite small, and only has a handful of games. I mean, the ideal N64 library is also quite small: only 306 North American or PAL (~English language) games were ever released. But 306 seems so eminently achievable that it makes the small selection of games on the service that much more dramatic.
What would you say they're missing? I mean, all of the NES, SNES, and N64 Mario games are on there, along with all of the Zelda games on those consoles. Nearly all of Nintendo's IP's are on there. I can't really imagine anything that it's truly missing.
> all of the NES, SNES, and N64 Mario games are on there
Super Mario RPG isn’t.
Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy 6, Mega Man X, TMNT. I’d even pay a couple bucks to waste an hour playing Bart’s Nightmare again.
Pokémon is a nonentity.
It’d be a hell of a nostalgia trip to play Rampage, IronSword, Monster Party, Linus Spacehead, Treasure Island Dizzy, Super Robinhood, or Boomerang Kid.
Chrono Cross and FF6 have rereleases out now (don't remember the platforms). The issue with that being you have to play Chrono Cross, which you probably don't actually want to do.
Both the NES and the SNES have emulators which are cycle-accurate including the weird peripherals and cartridges with strange extension. They are by far the easiest system to emulate properly nowadays.
Weird glitches. Flicker, or colors being wrong. Things running at the wrong speed. Things not rendering right. Sometimes the game crashes at certain spots.
A lot of games have been perfectly playable on emulators since the 90's, but they may not have been totally representative of the look and feel on the original hardware. If you look at emulator compatibility docs they frequently will list an estimation of how faithful it is to the original hardware, and as well denote, "Completable" (i.e. you can actually play the game all the way through without something devastating happening, or you getting stuck because a door never opens or something like that)
> Weird glitches. Flicker, or colors being wrong. Things running at the wrong speed. Things not rendering right. Sometimes the game crashes at certain spots.
A lot of those were there in the original, especially flicker on NES, which was due to the sprite limits. That's actually something you can turn off in modern emulators, because it's an old and annoying hardware limit on the number of sprites per line.
Some of the weird flicker/color glitches in the corners weren't visible or as noticeable on old CRT monitors, but they were still there as well because CRTs had rounded corners and some of the pixels there could be lost.
If anything, emulators let you have an experience superior to the old days to filters, ways to bypass sprite limits, etc. And some games have been extensively patched by fans (Final Fantasy 4/6j in particular) or were only translated by fans, etc.
That said, there are some differences in viewing things on a modern monitor vs. a CRT because of how the CRTs had more persistence due to how phosphors work and this could cause color bleed that's not there any longer.
No offense, but this really reads like a post from 15 years ago. It's not true anymore for NES and SNES and has not been for years. Look at mesen and bsnes -- 100% compatibility, indistinguishable from real hardware on every released game.
Your post is still accurate if you're talking about newer hardware like the Wii or PS2. Even N64 emulation is still kind of sketchy 25 years later due to the weird exoticity of that system.
yea gonna have to call BS on this. there's more NES and SNES emulators around these days than any other systems and their compatibility and accuracy is mind-blowing.
Nintendo is in the best position - since they never focused on specs all of their consoles are easily emulate-able.
There’s really no excuse. Even from a revenue perspective I’m confident they’d make more money this way. Make it so it works on any device - again Nintendo can do this because the consoles don’t require great computers to emulate.
You probably could run 100 gba emulators simultaneously at 120fps on a modern commodity desktop.