Why is Retro Nintendo Inaccessible?
On March 27th 2023, the 3DS and WiiU eShop was officially discontinued. This means that, for any Nintendo console older than the Switch, it is now impossible to buy first-hand copies of games from Nintendo. If Switch users pay for the Nintendo Switch Online service, a monthly or yearly subscription, they can access versions of NES, SNES and Game Boy games, and if they shell out up to an extra £30, that list expands to include N64, GBA, and even SEGA Genesis games. However, for those games in the middle, the market is restricted to second-hand reselling… and the dreaded emulation.
Homebrewing consoles and illegally downloading games has been slowly becoming a more popular practice over the last few years. Today, I spoke to two of my friends (names redacted, since we’re technically discussing crime) about the practice, hoping to figure out why people think all this happens, and how they think we should deal with the growing inaccessibility of older Nintendo games.
Beanie Pollard (Nintendo Central): So, which Nintendo consoles do you own? How often do you play Nintendo games?
S: I don’t own any Nintendo consoles at the moment, unfortunately. I wish I could play Nintendo games more often, because they’re awesome! I used to play all the Pokémon games and Mario games — I love Super Smash Bros in particular, and I wish I had played Super Mario Galaxy more while I still had the hardware to do so — but I never got a Switch.
E: When I was younger, my family owned a Wii, and I believe we still have that in storage somewhere. But as for myself currently, I have a Switch (one of the original models, not a Lite or an OLED display), and a New Nintendo 2DS XL. I play Nintendo games pretty regularly! At least an hour every week, although if I’m particularly interested in a specific game, I’ll play it during basically all my free time.
Beanie: Do you ever feel the desire to go back and play older Nintendo games?
S: I have that desire more often recently than I did in the past, both because I don’t own the hardware to play those games on, but also because the game selection available on other platforms doesn’t appeal to me very much these days. I have family who own an XBox, but the only platform I consistently have access to games on is PC, and there is a lack of PC games I really feel motivated to play. A lot of the time, I wish I could just pick up a game like Pokémon Ruby and play through it when I’m bored.
E: Oh, all the time. I’m a fan of Pokemon and Fire Emblem, and those two series have a lot of older games from old consoles!
Beanie: It can cost between £3.49 a month for the basic individual plan of Nintendo Switch Online and £59.99 a year for the expanded family plan. Do you think that’s good value?
S: As I said, I don’t have a Switch, but I believe that online functionality for video games should be completely free. When you’ve already paid for the console and the game, it’s just money-grabbing to ask people to pay a subscription fee to play with others. This is a problem that comes from consumerism — you used to be able to buy a game fully made and with all its features included, but now there are day-zero patches, microtransactions, DLCs and other gated content in most modern releases. Local play is also being neglected here; the old ways of including a split-screen multiplayer mode is now usually restricted to games that are specifically being marketed as “party games”.
E: My brother pays for a family plan of NSO that includes the Expansion Pack. Quite frankly, I think that it’s not worth that price. The benefits the expansion offers are nice, but neither of us actually use them at all. Free DLCs are helpful, but if we wanted them, it’d be less expensive to just buy them ourselves for whatever games we wanted than to continue paying a flat fee for something we mostly don’t make use of.
Beanie: So what do you think of the recent popularity of homebrewing consoles and emulation? Do you think doing this is ethical? Does Nintendo give us a choice?
S: I have actually homebrewed a few 3DS consoles myself before. I know how to do it, and I know the sites where you can download popular titles for free. I think that, if the game and the console have been discontinued, and Nintendo already made their paycheck off it, then it’s not an ethical issue. The thing I have a moral problem with is downloading third-party titles by independent game developers who don’t have the monetary backing that Nintendo has for their first-party releases — I would feel very guilty about emulating one of those, because I’d know that I was depriving those developers of well-earned compensation for their hard work. If I wanted to play a third-party game, but I couldn’t find a legal way to obtain it, I’d try to give money to the creators another way, like if they had a donation link on their website. But for big name games that Nintendo made a lot of money from, released on consoles that they don’t provide support for any more… I don’t think they’re going to miss the £13.99 I would have been paying for Super Mario 2: Gold Edition.
E: The first Nintendo game I ever played was emulated. It was a copy of Pokémon Emerald that I played for days on end, and it started me off on the path to become the person I am today. I do go out of my way to look for online and physical availability for games that I want to play. But, for a lot of old games, there’s no reasonable way to acquire them. Physical copies of older Nintendo games are listed online at prices that are quite literally over half of my bi-weekly paycheck. Sometimes more than it entirely. I want to support Nintendo! If they gave me an option to buy older games that wouldn’t threaten my ability to support myself, I’d take it. But in the current circumstances, where there are no online options available, and physical copies are limited and cost upwards of hundreds of dollars, I can’t take those options.
The money from those second-hand physical copies isn’t going to Nintendo anyway — they create false scarcity with their older games by not making them available on the Virtual Console even when they have the ability and the demand. For new games, the number of people downloading them illegally is comparatively so small that it doesn’t really matter to Nintendo’s profit margins; their current net worth is $53.09 billion, and Pokémon Scarlet and Violet sold over 20 million units in the first six weeks of their release (I was one of those numbers!)
I want to buy Nintendo’s games, but more than that, I want to play them. So if there are no other options available to me, I will emulate their games. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.
Beanie: What’s your opinion on the independent developer question?
E: I may mainly play Nintendo games, but I adore games made by other developers. There’s a sense of creativity and novelty that are sometimes absent from bigger games. I would never pirate or emulate from small developers. If there’s a game I’ve found that I’m interested in playing, I’ll pay for it. It took effort and skill to make the game, so I’ll reward them for that as best I can!
Beanie: Is there anything else you’d like to mention?
S: Nintendo also have a huge problem with preventing user repair. The DS was built to be easy to take apart and fix — you could see the screws in the device, and I’ve repaired multiple DS consoles before. Now, though, Nintendo intentionally builds their consoles to be more difficult to repair at home. In the Switch, it feels like every single part has been soldered in, and it forces people with broken Switches to send their device to the company and pay their in-house rates to get it fixed unless they’re experts or have a lot more mechanical repair tools than the average person. Nintendo are very wasteful, both with their hardware and their software, and that disappoints me.
E: Waluigi should have been in Smash!
Beanie: … Thanks.
So that’s it — the people have spoken. Nintendo make their retro games inaccessible to create false scarcity, to make it seem like the physical copies that do exist are more valuable than they could be. Emulation provides an easy answer to that, and while these two would rather limit their use of it to just first-party titles that Nintendo already made their buck off, they’re not afraid of the practice!
What do you think about the issue? Leave a response to let me know where you stand on the debate!
