I decided to check out the 3DS E-shop game library to see if there is anything there I would like to have. Even if a consumer is disinterested in a product, they still keep an eye on it. My rule for purchasing a game console is have 6 games on it I want to buy with three of them out. E-shop games I consider a .5 game. If there are two I want to buy, that counts as one game.
And there were several games I want to buy from the E-shop. One of them is Zelda DX. This is more my type of Zelda before the series imploded. Another one is Gargoyle’s Quest which is quite a meaty Gameboy game. Other usual suspects are the 2d Mario games (though skipping Super Mario Land since I’ve played that so many times). Even a game like Qix I find highly appealing despite it being ‘simple’. I’m also overjoyed to see the original Gameboy Tetris available. That is the best Tetris ever made. I still play that game on my brick Gameboy.
But there are two problems that prevent me from going any further. The first is that some E-shop games are only available to the ambassador program. That’s stupid. Why can’t I purchase your digital product, Nintendo? I mean games like Super Mario Kart Circuit. I really dislike the idea that I cannot purchase all the games available.
But the other big issue is the lack of any account system. The price for some of these games is $4 or in Zelda DX’s case it is $6. This is expensive for digital games. And I don’t mind paying the price.
But…
With the game being attached to the hardware, the game loses all its value. Nintendo handhelds are constantly upgraded. Why should I invest in these games if I cannot keep them with me? If Nintendo allowed me to buy these games and keep playing them with the next hardware (and without me having to send in the hardware in some sort of stupid ‘exchange program’), I would gladly buy these games to add to my library. These are games I not only want to play now but maybe many years down in the future.
Digital games are not just pluses for game company. There are pluses for the consumer that must be realized. One of these pluses is that since there is no cartridge, the game should be playable on all hardware. I’ve already bought these games once when they were first published. It’s bad enough I am buying them again. Yet, without an account system, Nintendo is telling me I must keep purchasing them. Well, I’d rather not buy anything at all then.
I own at least a hundred games for the Wii’s Virtual Console. I would buy more except I was hitting a ridiculous point where building up this library made no sense if I couldn’t keep taking it with me.
NCL might ask, “Why do you need to take it with out? Why not just buy it all over again?”
It is because of limited time. Gamers like to own a ton of games, even if they can’t play them all at once or all the time, because it makes us feel rich.
Nintendo’s current path of ‘send in your hardware and we’ll transfer the software for you’ is telling me not to ever buy anything from Nintendo again. This is stupid. I bought your digital games. They are not hardware based since they were designed on another hardware. So why are they attached to the hardware?
Nintendo is not losing any money from having an account system. There was no mechanism to create revenue from these legacy titles except a re-release (which can be risky). What most gamers do is pirate them with PC emulators. The alternative to that is to buy them on game consoles. But no one is going to buy them if they are attached to hardware (or that we have to insultingly send in our hardware to Nintendo to ‘transfer’ over digital titles).
Nintendo, all these VC games are easily pirated. You gain nothing for forcing us to go through these hoops.
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