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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 th

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.

idonotknowwhy 5y ago
The did focus on specs prior to the wii. GameCube > ps2 (apart from disc capacity) N64 > Ps1 (again, apart from storage)
duxup 5y ago
That’s on the Switch to some extent.
- fuzzer37 5y ago
  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NES * SNES * N64 * Sega Genesis I guess you could argue that Gamecube isn't represented yet, but that's the only major out of date system that isn't included (Understanding that almost any game playable on the WiiU is also on the Switch).
  - Legion 5y ago
    > Although I'd say nearly every game worth playing is already on there, besides a couple N64 games I'd say it takes a very narrow view of what's "worth playing" to say that. To me, the Switch Online emulation services are defined by what they're missing.
    - fuzzer37 5y ago
      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.
      - LukeShu 5y ago
        (edit: This comment speaks to the N64 only) Nintendo IPs: Donkey Kong 64. Diddy Kong Racing. Kirby 64 (Crystal Shards). Any of the Pokemons. Any of the Bombermans. Excitebike 64. Non-Nintendo IPs: GoldenEye. Any of the Tony Hawk Pro Skaters[1]. Either Duke Nukem. Doom 64[2]. The second Banjo-Kazooie. Wave Race. Earthworm Jim. [1]: Pro Skater 1 & 2 have been released for the Switch separately from NSO; $40 for both of them as a bundle. 3 has not been released for the Switch. [2]: Doom 64 has been released for the Switch separately from NSO; for $5.
        duxup 5y ago
        The non Nintendo IPs are necessarily Nintendo’s to use.
        1986 5y ago
        The $40 THPS 1+2 isn't emulated, though, it's a full remake.
        LukeShu 5y ago
        I had been lead to believe that it's a source-port + remaster, not a full remake. But IDK. Likewise, I assume the Doom 64 release is a source-port, not emulated.
      - Adraghast 5y ago
        > 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.
  - LukeShu 5y ago
    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.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 5y ago
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.
- owlninja 5y ago
  The Virtual Console on Wii did not continue on.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 5y ago
    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.
    - causality0 5y ago
      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.
      - 0x0 5y ago
        Sorry but no, the play store will prevent you from installing old apps on new phones very soon. https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/targe...
nfRfqX5n 5y ago
game licensing seems like it would be a massive issue
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
  Modern vintage gamer (a decent youtube free vintage gaming advocate) cites this for the original Xbox but I think it affects Nintendo also.
Firmwarrior 5y ago
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.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  > 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.
  - wildzzz 5y ago
    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.
- cruano 5y ago
  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
- Gigachad 5y ago
  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.
kevincox 5y ago
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?
Alex3917 5y ago
> since they never focused on specs all of their consoles are easily emulate-able. I dunno, the NES and SNES emulators all tend to be terrible, except for the NES and SNES Classic.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Really? I have never had any issues playing old NES and SNES games on RetroArch. What makes the emulators terrible?
  - RajT88 5y ago
    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)
    - Natsu 5y ago
      > 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.
ranger_danger 5y ago
Because emulation by Nintendo in any capacity at all has always been a black hole of monetary losses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093436 They don't make any money from it at all.
ghostly_s 5y ago
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.

idonotknowwhy 5y ago

The did focus on specs prior to the wii. GameCube > ps2 (apart from disc capacity) N64 > Ps1 (again, apart from storage)

duxup 5y ago

That’s on the Switch to some extent.

fuzzer37 5y ago
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).
- Legion 5y ago
  > Although I'd say nearly every game worth playing is already on there, besides a couple N64 games I'd say it takes a very narrow view of what's "worth playing" to say that. To me, the Switch Online emulation services are defined by what they're missing.
  - fuzzer37 5y ago
    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.
    - LukeShu 5y ago
      (edit: This comment speaks to the N64 only) Nintendo IPs: Donkey Kong 64. Diddy Kong Racing. Kirby 64 (Crystal Shards). Any of the Pokemons. Any of the Bombermans. Excitebike 64. Non-Nintendo IPs: GoldenEye. Any of the Tony Hawk Pro Skaters[1]. Either Duke Nukem. Doom 64[2]. The second Banjo-Kazooie. Wave Race. Earthworm Jim. [1]: Pro Skater 1 & 2 have been released for the Switch separately from NSO; $40 for both of them as a bundle. 3 has not been released for the Switch. [2]: Doom 64 has been released for the Switch separately from NSO; for $5.
      - duxup 5y ago
        The non Nintendo IPs are necessarily Nintendo’s to use.
      - 1986 5y ago
        The $40 THPS 1+2 isn't emulated, though, it's a full remake.
        LukeShu 5y ago
        I had been lead to believe that it's a source-port + remaster, not a full remake. But IDK. Likewise, I assume the Doom 64 release is a source-port, not emulated.
    - Adraghast 5y ago
      > 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.
- LukeShu 5y ago
  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.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 5y ago

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.

owlninja 5y ago
The Virtual Console on Wii did not continue on.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 5y ago
  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.
  - causality0 5y ago
    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.
    - 0x0 5y ago
      Sorry but no, the play store will prevent you from installing old apps on new phones very soon. https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/targe...

nfRfqX5n 5y ago

game licensing seems like it would be a massive issue

hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
Modern vintage gamer (a decent youtube free vintage gaming advocate) cites this for the original Xbox but I think it affects Nintendo also.

Firmwarrior 5y ago

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.

shkkmo 5y ago
> 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.
- wildzzz 5y ago
  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.
cruano 5y ago
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
Gigachad 5y ago
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.

kevincox 5y ago

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?

Alex3917 5y ago

> since they never focused on specs all of their consoles are easily emulate-able. I dunno, the NES and SNES emulators all tend to be terrible, except for the NES and SNES Classic.

cortesoft 5y ago
Really? I have never had any issues playing old NES and SNES games on RetroArch. What makes the emulators terrible?
- RajT88 5y ago
  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)
  - Natsu 5y ago
    > 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.

ranger_danger 5y ago

Because emulation by Nintendo in any capacity at all has always been a black hole of monetary losses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093436 They don't make any money from it at all.

ghostly_s 5y ago

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.