After talking about it for a while, Nintendo has finally pulled the plug on the Wii U and 3DS eShops.
Nintendo has been talking about this closure for the past year, but actually seeing it happen is pretty sad. Understandably, Nintendo has argued that both of those eShops were seeing fewer and fewer users, so it is merely a business decision to cut costs. But some of the games that could be found there are next to impossible to acquire now legally.
But what’s done is done, and there’s really no going back now. Besides titles for the Wii U and the 3DS, both eShops offered plenty of other retro experiences. These included titles from the original Wii all the way back to the Nintendo 64, SNES, and NES. These losses will hurt retro gamers the most, since getting your hands on some of those titles is next to impossible nowadays. Sure, you can easily emulate them if you own original cartridges or discs, but that’s pretty much it. There is the obvious illegal solution to this, but Nintendo is also putting a lot of pressure in that direction.
Nintendo critics are pretty sure that this decision will have further ramifications. The inability to buy “Virtual Console” titles means that they will slowly start rolling out some of those retro titles on the Nintendo Switch. They already have some on offer with the Nintendo Switch Online Memberships, but very few compared to what you could get on the eShop. And with prices for retro games skyrocketing in the past few years, it’s clear that Nintendo will continue milking our nostalgia for huge amounts of profit.
