Pokémon games as a service is bad news
An opinion piece on why I believe making past Pokémon titles available as part of a service is a bad idea for fans.
On March 27th 2023, Nintendo shut down their Wii U and 3DS eShop stores, removing access to hundreds of titles, many of which have no available release elsewhere. It marks the end of the Virtual Console, which was first available on the Wii in November 2006. Many of these titles include Pokémon games not currently accessible in an official capacity on Switch at the time of writing. Anyone wishing to play classic titles beyond this date will have to settle for a much smaller number of games added to the Nintendo Switch Online Service (NSO), and only when the company decides to add them. In October 2023, Nintendo announced that the online functionality for these consoles would cease in April 2024 (except Pokémon Bank on 3DS). Today, I want to talk about why I believe service Pokémon games, and gaming as a service in general, is bad news for fans.
Disclaimer: This feature was written between April and October 2023, without any foresight into future plans by Nintendo or the Pokémon Company.
The idea of having a wide variety of games at your disposal for a small fee, where you can play as much or as little as you want, sounds great in theory. Imagine this was the case for Pokémon, allowing everyone equal access to the same titles for no additional cost! However, consider the amount of control and ownership you have over those titles released today, compared to when they were originally released. You may see that there’s a large difference.
Let’s look at the NSO service at the time of writing (October 2023). Currently, there are two tiers of membership to the online service that could be of interest to Pokémon fans if mainline games are added: a basic membership with access to Game Boy titles, and a premium membership that grants access to Nintendo 64 and Game Boy Advance games, platforms that Pokémon has appeared on. A family pass can also be purchased for up to eight people, which can save money if everyone on it splits the cost.
When you subscribe to NSO, you are not purchasing a game outright; you are paying for the service, which gives you access while your subscription is active or until the service ends. Once this happens, your access to those titles is gone. Even if you have an active subscription, there is the possibility of the service ending at any point, potentially restricting access without a moment's notice. As more games are added, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the price of NSO will rise further, even if you don’t plan to make use of everything the subscription offers.
When it comes to Pokémon, players have been known to dedicate countless hours and memories to each title they play. That they can simply disappear someday, along with save data, because the company no longer wants players to have access to them or because people can’t afford to pay a subscription, is a concerning thought. I could also see a future where games are cloud-based, streamable to consoles where you don’t even get the opportunity to download the data itself. Is this really what we want for our classic games?
Purchasing games digitally isn’t perfect. Consumers legally own the licence and not the product, but there was at least the option to play them anytime you wanted without needing an active online account. You could choose what you wanted to buy without any further cost involved, and that’s what the NSO service excludes. While there are benefits to having access to many different games as part of the subscription service, such as trying a wider variety of games, losing even more control over what we play and how we play it should be a concern to everyone.
Nintendo has a poor history when it comes to offering titles from their archives. Wii owners could carry forward their games to Wii U, but if you wanted the convenience of playing them on the Wii U Game Pad, it was only possible when they were finally released on the successor, with additional charges. Wii U started anew with its Virtual Console service, with some games never making a return. It was also disappointing to see that Nintendo didn’t allow players to carry their purchases over to the Nintendo Switch family of consoles.
One could argue that licensing issues played a part, but for games where Nintendo retains full ownership, there was no excuse not to allow consumers to carry their games forward. Nintendo have now shut down online storefronts for Wii, DSiWare, 3DS and Wii U. The only way to play these classic games at the moment is through the NSO service.
As of September 2022, Nintendo confirmed that over 36 million people are subscribed to their service, so this is absolutely the future for our retro games content, and for Pokémon if it ever arrives on the platform. A good compromise would be to allow players to purchase games they want individually, so they can continue to enjoy them even without a subscription. This is already the case for certain types of DLC such as the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course Pass, which is free for the Expansion Pack tier membership. More options for consumers is a positive thing, but I simply do not believe Nintendo has any intention of doing this.
As much as I hope to be proven wrong, I am not confident enough that the Nintendo Switch Online service will be a constant presence or even good value for money as the years go by. It certainly won’t be comparable to the Virtual Console service of the past. Unfortunately, the alternatives for legally owning Pokémon games are costly, and I don’t believe there are enough voices willing to call this out to make any meaningful impact to the service.