Link: ‘Nintendo as a Service’

A good article from Kyle Russell at TechCrunch on Nintendo’s current woes, and some of the big issues with their current strategy.

Last week, Nintendo announced that it was bringing games from the Nintendo 64 and Nintendo DS consoles to the Wii U’s Virtual Console. The first wave of titles included just two games: Super Mario 64 and Yoshi’s Island DS. This limited release seems rather odd, given the fact that the emulation community has been playing games from both consoles on less powerful devices for years.

I did not realize this. I knew Nintendo had serious problems with their online account management (you can only play purchased games on the one device you used to purchase them). I did NOT realize that they’d done such an awful job rereleasing their back catalog.

This is insanity. I understand a reason why accounts could be so messed up (greed). I understand why cross-play functionality doesn’t exist (a combination of greed and lack of cloud service experience). But I have no clue why Nintendo doesn’t sell every single first-party game they can emulate digitally. There is no inventory to manage¹, no boxes to manufacture, no disks to print.

It’s free money. The emulator is already built. People will spend money on games they have fond memories of. Distributing those games costs Nintendo effectively nothing.