an in depth post of why it doesn't matter that nintendo is shutting down the wii u and 3rd virtual console:
the biggest complaint about this seems to be that nintendo has some obligation to constantly sell every game they've ever made for "preservation" of video games or whatever; there's a bunch of problems with this logic
right off the bat, i think the idea that a company must always offer every product they've made is bizarre. sometimes things become outdated and are no longer sold and that's just life. this feels like a relatively new idea, does this apply to other media? old tv shows? movies? before streaming services some things just stopped airing on television/ never aired on television and then what? buy the dvds? what about when those went out of production? companies don't have any obligation to offer their old products but that's only the tip of the iceberg;
this also seems to imply that the wii u and 3ds are currently in production as well, which they of course aren't. i can buy them online, or in retro game stores; the same places i can buy retro games. obviously they're not especially hard to get a hold of, but if the eshops were kept open, how long until they are?? and with the wii u in particular, only just over 13 million units were even sold, that's just over a tenth of the current switch sales? can the 90 million switch owners who don't own a wii u go buy one so they can download old games on the wii u eshop??? obviously nintendo offering all their old games on their newest console would be great, but the implication that they have been doing this in any form is bizarre
this also all seems to imply that all/most of nintendos old games are available through virtual console? the wii u eshop currently offers 21 out of the 393 games released for n64, most of which are currently on NSO anyway. ive also not heard much of anything about the fact that there's currently no legal way to buy any gamecube games (excluding remasters) , so where does that fit in?
"BUT SWITCH ONLINE GAMES WONT BE AVAILABLE FOREVER, AND I CANT DOWNLOAD THEM TO MY CONSOLE" that's true, but will nintendo add another virtual console-esque way to play their games when it finally shuts down? who knows, but yelling about how you're gonna pirate all their games because you hate nintendo is hardly the way to show them you'd be interested in that. if you do want to show them you're interested, buy the games on the virtual console while you can, or play them on NSO.
a large portion of virtual console games are currently available on NSO. not ALL of them, but NSO is regularly updated with new games and we don't know what they'll add in the future; we've got a whole year left before the old eshops go down anyway.
it should go without saying that the majority of people upset about this weren't gonna buy these games anyway; and if they were, they already did. the majority of people saying "i'm gonna have to pirate nintendo games now :(" have already been pirating nintendo games before this, that's not new. i don't care that you're pirating games, but this isn't the reason why.
also, worth noting that if somehow you weren't aware, it costs a significant amount of money to maintain the eshop servers, and if nintendo is shutting them down that's likely because they're making little profit/losing money on them at this point (which makes sense, given that they're on nintendo's worst selling home console, and a system that they haven't touched in years, that's been replaced by the switch for a lot of people). at the end of the day nintendo IS a corporation, and corporations DO want to make money on you (that's kinda their thing) so to expect that they'd keep stuff online at their own expense simply because some guy online said they should is fantasy
tl;dr: corporations do not owe you all their old products, and you were already gonna pirate nintendo games. it's just nice to say it's the corporations fault (and people online said you should be mad)
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