As someone who's only a recent convert to the Wii U and 3DS lifestyle (I picked up both systems back in 2021) next week's shutdown of their online storefronts bums me out so much.
I've been perusing what's on offer (there are a lot of things I still haven't checked out yet) and, you know, it's such a shame that so many of these games are going to be inaccessible come April. In the grand scheme of things a system's games getting harder to find isn't the end of the world, it's happened with just about every other console prior to these, but with this being a digital shop I guess a part of me wanted to believe there was a world where these could have just stayed up indefinitely.I feel like there doesn't need to be any scarcity here.
More than anything else, maybe even more than losing their digital exclusives, the roughest part of this is that now there'll be no (legal) way for people to access so much of Nintendo's back catalog. The Nintendo Switch Online service's library is hardly a replacement for the Virtual Console and even that's dependent on their service being accessible. When they inevitably shutter that service in 2029 (or whenever) that'll presumably be the end of GBA and N64 (and whatever else) games on the Switch.
A YouTuber I've been following for a long time recently put out a video where he went through a "1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die" book from 2010 and tried to track down how many of them were still officially available. The results were pretty disappointing. A not insignificant number of games that you, apparently, "Must Play Before You Die" may as well not exist any more and I things like this sunsetting of the eShop are a large part of the reason why.
Back in the heyday of "PSOne Classics" Sony was honestly pretty great when it came to making their old, and in some cases nearly impossible to find, games playable at a decent price. Something like The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, a game that currently seems to be selling for just under $200 on eBay (at the bare minimum) can still, to this day, be bought and played by anyone (with a PS3, Vita, or PSP) for just $6. After namedropping it onstage at an E3 press conference in 2014, Shawn Layden wrote a blog post about how fan demand for Vib-Ribbon caused them to put in the effort to get it playable on those (then-modern) systems. (Curiously, he also said they were working on a way to make it playable on PS4 but that never came to fruition.) As of today, March 16, 2023, Sony's digital stores for those old consoles are still up but I feel it's only a matter of time before they too pull the plug on their legacy (they've already tried once).
To bring this back to Nintendo, let's look at Pokemon Bank. It's a 3DS app that, among other things, should let you transfer Pokemon from your 3DS Pokemon games to "the cloud" so they could potentially be accessible on the Switch. With the backwards-compatibility inherent to most of Nintendo's previous handhelds, a Pokemon you initially caught on a Game Boy Advance could have been transferred to a DS, then a 3DS, and now (through some other services) to the Switch. Once the eShop closes there'll be no way for new people to achieve that sort of continuity.
I realize this has been a bit of a digression but I just wanted to show that, for a time, these companies embraced the fact that they had decades of history and successfully managed to capitalize on it. Once this Wii U and 3DS eShop closes, or the PS3's, or the Vita's, or whatever, there'll inevitably be some things that slip through the cracks and don't get replaced or rereleased down the line, making the pool of playable games ever so slightly smaller.
I don't know that I really have any sort of point to make after all of this but preservation is important and it makes me sad whenever it becomes clear that these corporations don't seem to agree.
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