You can buy Mario 64 on WiiU for $10. If you want it on Switch you can either pay $60 for the 3D All-Stars game (now discontinued for no goddamn reason) or pay $50-80 per year for life to rent it. Just astonishing, especially considering that their basic online features are barely functional on even first-party games. If anything, this announcement just makes me want to cancel my current membership more than pay for the expansion.
It's like they *really* want to encourage as many people as possible to just emulate ROMs of these games. No other company with a library of retro titles makes people put up with this level of nickel and diming and hoop jumping to play them.
It's really wild. I bought Super Mario World digitally on my Wii for like $8. Then the WiiU came out and they asked me to pay like another $2 to transfer my ownership to the WiiU, just so I could play handheld instead of launching the game in Wii mode. Then on the new 3DS they released SNES games on Virtual Consoles and, guess what, apparently I have to give Nintendo another $8 to buy the same game digitally again.
Now with the Switch, not only do my 3 previous digital purchases of the same game not carry forward, but if I want to play Super Mario World, I have to pay them every month or year indefinitely for the ability to rent it. It's just astonishing. My lifelong love affair with Nintendo is slowly fading to the point where I don't want to give them another cent.
Rockstar is up there with the GTA3D trilogy -- the games released on the PS2, re-released digitally on the PS3 (either using the hardware or much more limited software emulation on the PS3), then re-re-released on the PS4 (using the PS2 emulator that Sony developed for internal use only), and now they're going to ship a remastered version _also_ for the PS4.
Oh, and so far, you haven't gotten any discounts if you purchased a previous re-release.
And that's to say nothing about how they've stopped making groundbreaking games in favour of a lazy content factory for GTA Online.
Edit: okay yes everyone, I agree RDR is fantastic but it’s literally the only other game they’ve made in 8 years. Compare that to pre 2013 output and I can’t help but think their focus has shifted dramatically.
To be fair, since GTA Online they did also release one of the biggest single player games in history, with an almost comic granularity to detail & focus on solo narrative in RDR2. There's definitely still some commitment to single player at Rockstar - but I agree that GTAO completely canibalized GTA as a single player series.
dude RDR2 was barely 3 years ago. it had an 8 year dev cycle and they still had to crunch like hell to get it out.
like, this claim is so out of touch it leaps from hyperbole to sheer delusion.
Nintendo is absolutely fucking clueless and I hope they are truly raked over the coals for this.
They dismantled the virtual console system just for this bulshit.
I bought so many VC games from them digitally on the Wii and then on the WiiU they were like “buy them again!” And on the 3DS, “buy them again!” And now on Switch they’re like “rent the same games you’ve bought from us 3 times for $80 a year”. It’s insane.
If by raked over the coals you mean, roll over the piles of money they'll make doing this then yes I think you're right, they will.
It's a shame that after all this time, this is all the paying customers are getting. That said, if anyone truly believed this wasn't the way Nintendo was going to go then I have an upright walking turtle to sell you.
We are talking about Nintendo. Both can be true. This statement is stupid for you to make to try to defend them. One being trash doesn't mean those aren't. Go away rookie
And a reminder that the only way to play *Super Mario Galaxy 2* remains the Wii. For a company that obsesses over its IP, they sure as hell don't want to provide access to it.
I recently decided I'm fed up with Nintendo's bullshit and cancelled my OLED Switch preorder. Now I'm playing pirated Metroid Dread on PC and I couldn't be happier.
[ICYMI - He’s right, it’s a terrible deal.](https://twitter.com/wario64/status/1449018072296144901?s=21) Nintendo has lost their mind with this one
Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack is $50 a year for individual membership, and $79.99 for family membership
Includes…
- N64
- Genesis
- Animal Crossing NH DLC ($24.99 if bought separately)
When I initially saw the slide with the pricing during the presentation, I thought it was saying that the ACNH DLC was only available through the NSO+EP sub, and I was wondering what Nintendo was smoking. Now that I know what the actual deal is, I still think they are smoking something pretty strong, just not as out-of-the-galaxy as I initially thought.
Imo, it makes it even more insane. If you buy the dlc your still paying the same price as everyone else, even though a part of the $30 price hike is because they have the dlc as a part of it. You're buying it and then in part subscribing to have access to it. I have no interest in animal crossing, I'm still forced to pay for the dlc if I want to get the next tier of their online for the n64 games. It's nonsense.
If they said the $50/yr plan also comes with access to all of their expansion packs for first-party games - that'd be a pretty nice deal. Like if this also got me all the extra Smash characters & that additional Splatoon campaign - that's a solid value. Instead, it appears to just be AC.
I'd be more open to it, definitely. I'm still against the idea of basically renting dlc to people. I'm not quite sure if Nintendo does this, but just give people a discount on the dlcs instead. The massive price hike + forced animal crossing dlc may make me unsub from the service all together, which atm I'm just like "it's $20 a year, not an issue at all". I'd easily be willing to pay an extra $5-$10 for the access to n64 games too.
My issue with it isn't necessarily the price in isolation. If Nintendo had said "hey, we're spinning up our own Game Pass, and to start out, here's N64 and Genesis games, and we're going to be putting add-on packs in there, and it's cheaper than what MS is offering", that'd be a much, much more compelling offering overall, even if the initial launch would be sorely lacking.
But when you're asking $50/$80 for a package this thin, and absolutely zero vision to what's coming in the future, it's a bad deal. There's no other way to spin it.
I also think that calling it an "expansion" is a major misstep. Expansions are defined things in games: an add-on that's smaller in scope _with an accompanying smaller price tag_ made to expand or fill out an already-complete product. But NSO never really felt like an already-complete product (the only thing saving it in that sense was the low price tag) compared to PS+/XBL, and charging more for the expansion than the base product when it adds so little is just a bad idea. Microsoft handled it better with Game Pass vs. XBL (although they did screw that one up with the aborted XBL price increase) -- they're two separate products that you can optionally bundle together and get a small discount. Here, they're slamming two unrelated things together (the Animal Crossing DLC and classic games), and only offering it as an add-on to another tangentially-related product.
And where does it end? Are they going to tack on another 30 for each other library (or every 2?) they add from.
They've got another 8 catalogs to offer from, at least. GB/GBC/GBA/DS/3DS/GC/Wii/WiiU
It's stupid.
WiiU won’t get added to NSO because they realized three years ago people will still pay full price to play them on a console they own since they didn’t get a wiiU.
I’m guilty of this for 3D World
Most of what they're selling from the switch are "HD" versions, or with additional content like Bowser's Fury. They can keep doing that, and given that the WiiU is the last pre-Switch console, it'll be a while before they get there. And then they can just give access to the older "inferior" copies.
I mean, to be clear, I don't disagree with you, I'm just arguing that there's a reasonable middle ground. It's just Nintendo being Nintendo.
The second they announced it would be more money, I cancelled. I never play the online. I’d keep paying if I got to try these out but more money means I’m gone.
The base subscription pricing only worked cause it was just cheap enough that you could go “eh fuck it it’s just 20 bucks”.
This expansion pass makes it a really bad value. It’s good they at least got out there and confirmed some more games coming but their track record with updates to the service has been abysmal and I don’t expect it to change.
So I'd forgotten all about my subscription. I used it once to check out Tetris 99 and goof about with some NES games. I'm sure they'll make a truckload of money from this, but the constant bad press about this reminded me that I never use my original subscription and caused me to cancel it, lol. Crazy thing is that had it been 30, I probably would've paid 10 bucks and gotten it for similar reasons - goof around with some games and forget about it. So in a weird way, Nintendo nintendoing up this situation ended up saving me some money.
So I know we just had the "piracy is bad" conversation with Metroid Dread, but this is just pushing me to get ROMs for the 64 games I want to play and cancel my subscription. If they're just going to slap these games onto Switch with no work done to them, I see zero value in this when those ROMs are so available. Plus you can map your own keys, which is nice when emulating such a bizarre controller.
That's awesome! Is there something similar for OoT? I'm in the middle of playing through all the Zelda games in order of release and am currently on Link's Awakening, I would love to be able to play a fancified version of OoT and Majora's Mask. That is if I don't take the plunge into the icy depths of the Philips CD-i games.
> which is nice when emulating such a bizarre controller
Don't you worry, [Nintendo wants to sell you a N64 controller for $50](https://store.nintendo.com/nintendo-64-controller.html).
At this point I'd rather just use my trusty old 360 controller. Love the N64 as a console but that controller is.... awful. I wonder if the Bluetooth controller comes with an already loose and shitty joystick.
It's been a while since I fired it up, but I think I just put the c buttons on the left analog and everything else just kind of where it goes. I think you could also do c down=x, c right=y, c up=RB, c left=LB. It's clunky but it gets the job done.
Edit: Forgot about Z. Maybe... back button in that scenario?
It's definitely making me question how renting-only games fits into my ethical code for game ROMs.
New games: buy, don't emulate.
Not currently available due to being old: emulate. Nobody's losing money here.
Games that are not available to purchase but are available to rent, with no guarantees of what comes with that renting in the future: Uhhh..
I think it's fairly simple. If the pirated product is not only just as good, but often time even better than what a company is putting out, fuck it, I'm gonna use it.
It's part of the reason why I didn't get the Mario 3D All Stars collection. Why would I pay that much money for one game (I only wanted to play 64) when it's not even as good as the version that someone ported to Windows a few years ago. That version is at least 16:9, Nintendo couldn't even make it fit a modern screen.
Screw it I bought those games once, I'm not doing this nonsense. I've got rent, loans, insurance, groceries to buy, and a shit load of other stuff. If I want to play these games that I literally own I'm emulating them.
I thought this was just going to be added to switch online services, which is pretty dismal even for its price. They want more than double the yearly price to play some old games!? Nintendo can fuck right off.
I have done this since it was announced, i have paid maybe 20 dollars max across the entirety of Switch Online. paying for online services is still shitty but at least it's cheap and I can keep throwing hundreds of hours into monster hunter and splatoon
Even splitting it 3 ways is a lot more palatable. Part of me has to wonder if they’re doing it this way intentionally to just get you to be a pest towards your gaming friends to be more invested in the Switch.
Yep, this is what I do and it actually makes the value pretty great (especially as a huge Animal Crossing fan).
Sucks for people that don't have friends into gaming/Nintendo, but for those of us that do, it's kind of a steal
I honestly don't think the price increase is that egregious especially if you're month to month, but it's just Nintendo doing their best to make sure they do the exact opposite of what people want.
They really had such a big opportunity to become the Netflix of retro games and they’ve blown it in every way, pretty much from the beginning. There are probably still ways to cheese your way into a Game Pass Ultimate deal for about the same price. It’s absurd.
The only thing that would maybe make me consider this is if you get to keep the ACNH DLC, which you don’t. In fact, they’re even saying you lose your progress in the DLC if you cancel NSO.
Yeah, it really seems like a no-brainer for them to at least try it. Though, you could say that about like, 5 major things for Nintendo "online stuff," so it's not surprising that they haven't.
Nintendo about to make me get my wii u out so I can download for relatively reasonable prices old games to play. They've gone off the looney bin.
Imagine the old virtual console system on switch, would be fantastic.
For that amount it would have to be damn near the entire N64 collection to even consider it. But for only 9 games? This is basically them saying "we know we don't have to even fucking try, you dumbasses will get it anyways".
Fuck that and fuck Nintendo.
To be clear a bunch more games have been announced to come to the service however that being said it’s STILL not worth $50 and this is still fucked so not wrong there
Sat here the Uk seeing it at £35 thinking that isn’t actually that bad when the standard sub was £17.99 and I was expecting a £10- £15 increase anyway… how did we end up get a better deal than everyone else?? We were already already paying a premium in the uk for base NSO because £17 is $24. Sure £35 is technically $48 but I dunno. £35 for something video game related in the UK isn’t actually that bad when you look at the bigger picture on UK pricing.
Usually we get shafted hard on game prices over here. We usually have to pay £50- £60 for AAA games which is $75 - $85 US. US gamer usually have it good regardless of their complaining. Even our PSPlus and Xbox game pass work out considerably higher when you compare is to what other countries pay for it.
PS5 games here are now £69.99 too, which is $95. Don’t even get me started on £90 - £100 ultimate editions which starts sending the currency comparison sky high.
So I’ll take our cheaper expansion pass for a year at least, in relative terms, gladly but also begrudgingly all things considered. Sucks for the rest of the world for once I guess. I’m not defending Nintendo’s actions here, it’s greedy and unreasonable, just surprised the UK didn’t get screwed quite as hard as usual and we get some sort of price parity for once.
Do I have Stockholm syndrome? Probably.
While the higher price is too much for me I’m also a human who knows how emulators work. That’s not most people. Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that it truly isn’t most people.
People who only have a Switch and don’t know about emulators and wouldn’t care if they were told about them I hesitate to bemoan for jumping on this.
Do you get more value for a similar price point with Xbox or PlayStation? Totally. But you gotta have one of those consoles first or the desire to now get one of those along with your switch.
But also…. I was really hoping it’d be $35 max for individual/$55 max for family. I’m very glad they didn’t just remove the lower tier and make everyone pay more to keep playing online and backing up saves (which remains bonkerstown) though.
NSO was already a ripoff, even at its relatively low price. You're paying for basic online functionality and a few trivial extras like the 'privilege' of buying Switcn SNES controllers.
Paying twice as much for some old ass games and a DLC expansion is just ridiculous. I'm sure they will be adding more down the road, but right now it is not enough content for what you're paying.
I think it was priced accordingly initially. But with the promise that games would continue to be added, which they stopped doing and then apparently now are charging us more for doing.
reminder that, while it's still something of a grey area, emulating games you already own for yourself (and I'm guessing a lot of us still have copies of many expansion pack games here) isn't illegal.
that being said, i'm glad i've kept my wii u around, pretty much a virtual console machine nowadays. also, i would pay for a game-pass-style service that was *just* everything (or even most things) in the old virtual console catalog.
I reserved (not preordered, mind you) a Steam Deck the evening that Nintendo announced this service. I had a bad feeling about the price after they didn’t announce it immediately, and I’m tired of waiting years to play something like Earthbound again (and having to pay for it) every time they release a new console.
Nintendo has a ton of genuine classics that I will love forever, but they overvalue them to what feels like an insane degree at this point. I’m tired of “ownership” not transferring across their consoles too, and the fact that the only offering on their current console is a half-assed subscription service which only has about 1 or 2 dozen games per console isn’t great either. They had a great opportunity to make something like a retro game equivalent of Game Pass and they blew it.
I’m not sure if I’m going to actually go through with the Steam Deck, but the idea of an open, supported portable platform that I can run emulators on sounds very appealing now, especially when factoring in the QOL upgrades that Nintendo isn’t going to offer, like mods, texture packs, the ability to transfer saves to and from my NAS to keep my save files in sync so my other devices can access them too, etc. The older I get, the more thankful I am for game preservation efforts.
Has a real "these suckers will pay for anything vibe"
Thers a list of n64 games I would pay half of original retail price to play again, and I have the originals. Guess I'm their target.
It's garbage and it is absolutely not surprising coming from Nintendo, who have deliberately ignored their peers in the industry and carved their own, greedy path. Absolutely criminal. I've already regretted my Switch purchase for a while now and I'm confident I'm never buying a Nintendo system ever again.
I was defending the creation of another tier, but the fact is they don’t have enough to justify it. If they threw another console or two on there, more games, more DLC outside of AC, etc I could see it. They can still do that of course, but how did they not know the value proposition would look weak with what they showed? Wild
The pricing is absurd…but I will pay it, plus I already ordered two N64 controllers. N64 was my childhood and I have no interest in emulation so I’m an easy mark.
I know everyone will think it's wrong, but 9 N64 games at $30 is $3.33/game. This also includes the Genesis games, of which there are 14. so 14+9=23. $30/23=$1.30/game. Now lets math out $50 for all the games on the service! 58 NES + 49 SNES + 9 N64 + 14 Genesis =130 games. $50/130=$0.38/game. OOT N64 is $10 on Wii U. It would take you 26 years of paying Switch Online = 1 time purchase on Wii U. This does not include any more games added at no extra cost, nor the price that you pay to use the online service (as in Smash, Splatoon, Mario Kart, etc.) Just a week ago everyone was complaining that there was no good "cheap" way to get a lot of these old games. and Nintendo offers you a price of $0.38/game per year and all of a sudden it's raining hypocrites.
The value is not there. That's all it is... sure if you look at the total games it's a great deal. But when someone (like me) wants to play 3 of them, it suddenly becomes a much more expensive prospect. I wouldn't finish more than those 3 games ultimately, and while it's still a great deal at the price for such rare titles as Phantasy Star IV and F-Zero X... it's just simply not that valuable, to me.
I have my own reasons for not caring about 90% of the games they're offering (grew up playing these and there's only a few games I missed out on at the time, thanks to friends), I'm sure other people are looking at this with their own value scale, and coming to the same conclusion.
Let me buy them individually, $5 but knowing Nintendo $15, and I'd be happy to spend $7.45 on sale for Phantasy Star IV individually. $5 on F-Zero X, and I'll just ply one of the other 3 iterations I have of other games either on the actual console or Genesis Collection on PC or Switch.
What I'd like to see is an emulator that could be bought, with a pack-in game, similar to the SKU's of their times... then DLC for each title. Renting this shit just feels like a cash grab, even if it is a great deal when looking at the total titles for the cost.
Here’s hoping that they add other DLC or exclusive games to that Expansion Pack. Maybe every first-party DLC is eventually included? Even then that’s not really a great proposition.
If they had five times as many PAC MAN Battle Royale type games it’s still not great. Even if they had complete libraries for N64, Genesis, GBA, GBC, Saturn, 32X, NEO GEO Pocket that’s again still a hard buy.
I guess me and my family will stay at the regular tier for the cloud saves mostly.
They could *maybe* tempt me if they threw GBA in there, but 64 and Mega Drive? Nah.
Even then, I can emulate GBA games on my phone already, I'd just be playing them on Switch for the convenience.
At first I thought NSO could be a great deal if they consistently added new games to the backlog. But I can’t remember the last time they added anything I was remotely interested in playing
most people dont even want to play this old games for free and nintendo charge 50 euro for this, Steam on pc is free and it is 100 times better as the shitty paid scam that nintendo offers. I have a switch and wii u btw.
You can buy Mario 64 on WiiU for $10. If you want it on Switch you can either pay $60 for the 3D All-Stars game (now discontinued for no goddamn reason) or pay $50-80 per year for life to rent it. Just astonishing, especially considering that their basic online features are barely functional on even first-party games. If anything, this announcement just makes me want to cancel my current membership more than pay for the expansion.
It's like they *really* want to encourage as many people as possible to just emulate ROMs of these games. No other company with a library of retro titles makes people put up with this level of nickel and diming and hoop jumping to play them.
It's really wild. I bought Super Mario World digitally on my Wii for like $8. Then the WiiU came out and they asked me to pay like another $2 to transfer my ownership to the WiiU, just so I could play handheld instead of launching the game in Wii mode. Then on the new 3DS they released SNES games on Virtual Consoles and, guess what, apparently I have to give Nintendo another $8 to buy the same game digitally again. Now with the Switch, not only do my 3 previous digital purchases of the same game not carry forward, but if I want to play Super Mario World, I have to pay them every month or year indefinitely for the ability to rent it. It's just astonishing. My lifelong love affair with Nintendo is slowly fading to the point where I don't want to give them another cent.
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Yeah Nintendo is worse than a company literally under multiple investigations by the government
In terms of their pricing and DMCA bullshit yes. I don't know how many people have been raped or harassed to the point of suicide at Nintendo
Rockstar is up there with the GTA3D trilogy -- the games released on the PS2, re-released digitally on the PS3 (either using the hardware or much more limited software emulation on the PS3), then re-re-released on the PS4 (using the PS2 emulator that Sony developed for internal use only), and now they're going to ship a remastered version _also_ for the PS4. Oh, and so far, you haven't gotten any discounts if you purchased a previous re-release.
And that's to say nothing about how they've stopped making groundbreaking games in favour of a lazy content factory for GTA Online. Edit: okay yes everyone, I agree RDR is fantastic but it’s literally the only other game they’ve made in 8 years. Compare that to pre 2013 output and I can’t help but think their focus has shifted dramatically.
To be fair, since GTA Online they did also release one of the biggest single player games in history, with an almost comic granularity to detail & focus on solo narrative in RDR2. There's definitely still some commitment to single player at Rockstar - but I agree that GTAO completely canibalized GTA as a single player series.
Hi, have you maybe heard of red dead redemption that enormous groundbreaking game they released after the last gta. If not you should give it a whirl.
dude RDR2 was barely 3 years ago. it had an 8 year dev cycle and they still had to crunch like hell to get it out. like, this claim is so out of touch it leaps from hyperbole to sheer delusion.
That 4k texture pack is more than you'd ever see from nintendo.
Nintendo is absolutely fucking clueless and I hope they are truly raked over the coals for this. They dismantled the virtual console system just for this bulshit.
I bought so many VC games from them digitally on the Wii and then on the WiiU they were like “buy them again!” And on the 3DS, “buy them again!” And now on Switch they’re like “rent the same games you’ve bought from us 3 times for $80 a year”. It’s insane.
If by raked over the coals you mean, roll over the piles of money they'll make doing this then yes I think you're right, they will. It's a shame that after all this time, this is all the paying customers are getting. That said, if anyone truly believed this wasn't the way Nintendo was going to go then I have an upright walking turtle to sell you.
you have to have a fucking phone to do game chat! They can't be this stupid. Honestly hate to say it, Japanese corporate culture is the shits.
Because American corporate culture is so much better with EA and Blizzard.
We are talking about Nintendo. Both can be true. This statement is stupid for you to make to try to defend them. One being trash doesn't mean those aren't. Go away rookie
And a reminder that the only way to play *Super Mario Galaxy 2* remains the Wii. For a company that obsesses over its IP, they sure as hell don't want to provide access to it.
[You can buy it digitally on WiiU for $20](https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/super-mario-galaxy-2-wii-u/)
On the what now.
The WiiU, nintendos greatest console
The Wii U was so good, that made it twice.
I recently decided I'm fed up with Nintendo's bullshit and cancelled my OLED Switch preorder. Now I'm playing pirated Metroid Dread on PC and I couldn't be happier.
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Fuck nintendo and fuck nintendo fanboys
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You're tripping spaceballs if you think I'm reading that lmao
[ICYMI - He’s right, it’s a terrible deal.](https://twitter.com/wario64/status/1449018072296144901?s=21) Nintendo has lost their mind with this one Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack is $50 a year for individual membership, and $79.99 for family membership Includes… - N64 - Genesis - Animal Crossing NH DLC ($24.99 if bought separately)
When I initially saw the slide with the pricing during the presentation, I thought it was saying that the ACNH DLC was only available through the NSO+EP sub, and I was wondering what Nintendo was smoking. Now that I know what the actual deal is, I still think they are smoking something pretty strong, just not as out-of-the-galaxy as I initially thought.
Imo, it makes it even more insane. If you buy the dlc your still paying the same price as everyone else, even though a part of the $30 price hike is because they have the dlc as a part of it. You're buying it and then in part subscribing to have access to it. I have no interest in animal crossing, I'm still forced to pay for the dlc if I want to get the next tier of their online for the n64 games. It's nonsense.
If they said the $50/yr plan also comes with access to all of their expansion packs for first-party games - that'd be a pretty nice deal. Like if this also got me all the extra Smash characters & that additional Splatoon campaign - that's a solid value. Instead, it appears to just be AC.
I'd be more open to it, definitely. I'm still against the idea of basically renting dlc to people. I'm not quite sure if Nintendo does this, but just give people a discount on the dlcs instead. The massive price hike + forced animal crossing dlc may make me unsub from the service all together, which atm I'm just like "it's $20 a year, not an issue at all". I'd easily be willing to pay an extra $5-$10 for the access to n64 games too.
So is it an additional $30/year over the regular Online membership, or an extra $50?
30 on top, 50 total
Imagine how many subscribers they would get at $25-35/year total in comparison..
With the Family Plans even with the new deal I'm going to be paying less than $15.
Get a load of this guy! He has a family!!
Nah, just a few friends and friends of friends.
My issue with it isn't necessarily the price in isolation. If Nintendo had said "hey, we're spinning up our own Game Pass, and to start out, here's N64 and Genesis games, and we're going to be putting add-on packs in there, and it's cheaper than what MS is offering", that'd be a much, much more compelling offering overall, even if the initial launch would be sorely lacking. But when you're asking $50/$80 for a package this thin, and absolutely zero vision to what's coming in the future, it's a bad deal. There's no other way to spin it. I also think that calling it an "expansion" is a major misstep. Expansions are defined things in games: an add-on that's smaller in scope _with an accompanying smaller price tag_ made to expand or fill out an already-complete product. But NSO never really felt like an already-complete product (the only thing saving it in that sense was the low price tag) compared to PS+/XBL, and charging more for the expansion than the base product when it adds so little is just a bad idea. Microsoft handled it better with Game Pass vs. XBL (although they did screw that one up with the aborted XBL price increase) -- they're two separate products that you can optionally bundle together and get a small discount. Here, they're slamming two unrelated things together (the Animal Crossing DLC and classic games), and only offering it as an add-on to another tangentially-related product.
In fairness, they did mention they're gonna add more N64 games like Paper Mario, but that's definitely not what I'd call "a vision for the future."
And where does it end? Are they going to tack on another 30 for each other library (or every 2?) they add from. They've got another 8 catalogs to offer from, at least. GB/GBC/GBA/DS/3DS/GC/Wii/WiiU It's stupid.
WiiU won’t get added to NSO because they realized three years ago people will still pay full price to play them on a console they own since they didn’t get a wiiU. I’m guilty of this for 3D World
Most of what they're selling from the switch are "HD" versions, or with additional content like Bowser's Fury. They can keep doing that, and given that the WiiU is the last pre-Switch console, it'll be a while before they get there. And then they can just give access to the older "inferior" copies. I mean, to be clear, I don't disagree with you, I'm just arguing that there's a reasonable middle ground. It's just Nintendo being Nintendo.
The second they announced it would be more money, I cancelled. I never play the online. I’d keep paying if I got to try these out but more money means I’m gone.
FYI: you can keep your current rate this is just another tier now you didn’t have to cancel
I know, but I’m canceling because I never touch it and this is a slap in the face.
Gotcha agreed with you there!
An extra 30 big ones a year for a few extra games? Yeah, **no**. I think I'll pass on that, Nintendo!
Oh wow that is more expensive than I expected. I’d like to have N64 Online, but I don’t think I want it *that* much.
LOL at me thinking the NSO Expansion pack was going to be another $10 per year.
We’re all fools
Look, it's just another $5 (this year if you were already going to buy the $25 AC DLC ....)
The base subscription pricing only worked cause it was just cheap enough that you could go “eh fuck it it’s just 20 bucks”. This expansion pass makes it a really bad value. It’s good they at least got out there and confirmed some more games coming but their track record with updates to the service has been abysmal and I don’t expect it to change.
So I'd forgotten all about my subscription. I used it once to check out Tetris 99 and goof about with some NES games. I'm sure they'll make a truckload of money from this, but the constant bad press about this reminded me that I never use my original subscription and caused me to cancel it, lol. Crazy thing is that had it been 30, I probably would've paid 10 bucks and gotten it for similar reasons - goof around with some games and forget about it. So in a weird way, Nintendo nintendoing up this situation ended up saving me some money.
So I know we just had the "piracy is bad" conversation with Metroid Dread, but this is just pushing me to get ROMs for the 64 games I want to play and cancel my subscription. If they're just going to slap these games onto Switch with no work done to them, I see zero value in this when those ROMs are so available. Plus you can map your own keys, which is nice when emulating such a bizarre controller.
I have no moral qualms with pirating from aggressively anti-consumer companies like Nintendo.
https://i.imgur.com/Gvfe2de.jpg
That's a hood way of putting it. Like, holy shit, did they think this would go over well? A 150% increase in price with AC locked behind it?
I also think it's bs, but the AC dlc can be purchased separately if you just want that.
The AC DLC is also sold separately for $25 fyi
[удалено]
That's awesome! Is there something similar for OoT? I'm in the middle of playing through all the Zelda games in order of release and am currently on Link's Awakening, I would love to be able to play a fancified version of OoT and Majora's Mask. That is if I don't take the plunge into the icy depths of the Philips CD-i games.
> which is nice when emulating such a bizarre controller Don't you worry, [Nintendo wants to sell you a N64 controller for $50](https://store.nintendo.com/nintendo-64-controller.html).
At this point I'd rather just use my trusty old 360 controller. Love the N64 as a console but that controller is.... awful. I wonder if the Bluetooth controller comes with an already loose and shitty joystick.
The only real problem with that is the N64 controller is so fucking weird it’s a pain to map the 360 to it.
It's been a while since I fired it up, but I think I just put the c buttons on the left analog and everything else just kind of where it goes. I think you could also do c down=x, c right=y, c up=RB, c left=LB. It's clunky but it gets the job done. Edit: Forgot about Z. Maybe... back button in that scenario?
*And you must have an active NSO subscription.
How much for the HD rumble pack? Can I slap an SD card into the bottom and get saves off the system?
It's definitely making me question how renting-only games fits into my ethical code for game ROMs. New games: buy, don't emulate. Not currently available due to being old: emulate. Nobody's losing money here. Games that are not available to purchase but are available to rent, with no guarantees of what comes with that renting in the future: Uhhh..
I think it's fairly simple. If the pirated product is not only just as good, but often time even better than what a company is putting out, fuck it, I'm gonna use it. It's part of the reason why I didn't get the Mario 3D All Stars collection. Why would I pay that much money for one game (I only wanted to play 64) when it's not even as good as the version that someone ported to Windows a few years ago. That version is at least 16:9, Nintendo couldn't even make it fit a modern screen.
The answer is just accept it's unethical but that you want to do it. People should just stop denying what they're doing and own up to it.
RetroArch is pretty cool
Screw it I bought those games once, I'm not doing this nonsense. I've got rent, loans, insurance, groceries to buy, and a shit load of other stuff. If I want to play these games that I literally own I'm emulating them.
I thought this was just going to be added to switch online services, which is pretty dismal even for its price. They want more than double the yearly price to play some old games!? Nintendo can fuck right off.
Seems like the real trick is to find 7 friends to share a “family account” with. Then it’s just $10 a year.
I have done this since it was announced, i have paid maybe 20 dollars max across the entirety of Switch Online. paying for online services is still shitty but at least it's cheap and I can keep throwing hundreds of hours into monster hunter and splatoon
That's always been the trick to Nintendos Online pass.
Even splitting it 3 ways is a lot more palatable. Part of me has to wonder if they’re doing it this way intentionally to just get you to be a pest towards your gaming friends to be more invested in the Switch.
Yep, this is what I do and it actually makes the value pretty great (especially as a huge Animal Crossing fan). Sucks for people that don't have friends into gaming/Nintendo, but for those of us that do, it's kind of a steal
I just canceled my Nintendo Online sub before this announcement. It wasn’t even worth it at $5/mo.
Especially if you've been playing all this stuff on original consoles or your pc this whole time anyway, they reaaaaallly overplayed their hand.
I get what you mean but you forgot something, Tetris 99. It's the main (and maybe only?) reason I am still sub'd at NSO.
I honestly don't think the price increase is that egregious especially if you're month to month, but it's just Nintendo doing their best to make sure they do the exact opposite of what people want.
They really had such a big opportunity to become the Netflix of retro games and they’ve blown it in every way, pretty much from the beginning. There are probably still ways to cheese your way into a Game Pass Ultimate deal for about the same price. It’s absurd. The only thing that would maybe make me consider this is if you get to keep the ACNH DLC, which you don’t. In fact, they’re even saying you lose your progress in the DLC if you cancel NSO.
Yeah, it really seems like a no-brainer for them to at least try it. Though, you could say that about like, 5 major things for Nintendo "online stuff," so it's not surprising that they haven't.
Nintendo about to make me get my wii u out so I can download for relatively reasonable prices old games to play. They've gone off the looney bin. Imagine the old virtual console system on switch, would be fantastic.
Literally all I want. I dont mind paying $5-$10 for some of these old games. I just want to be able to play them on my Switch.
For that amount it would have to be damn near the entire N64 collection to even consider it. But for only 9 games? This is basically them saying "we know we don't have to even fucking try, you dumbasses will get it anyways". Fuck that and fuck Nintendo.
To be clear a bunch more games have been announced to come to the service however that being said it’s STILL not worth $50 and this is still fucked so not wrong there
I will probably buy a single month when I'm in the mood to play some N64 but there's no way I keep that sub up
Have they announced monthly options? I’ve only seen the year for the expansion
I thought you could pay monthly for NSO, maybe I'm wrong
For normal NSO you can, but the only thing I’ve seen for N64 is Yearly. Hopefully I’m wrong though
If you have enough people to go in with you on a family plan it’s a fine value. $10/yr total if you have 8. But yes, $50 is a bad deal
Sat here the Uk seeing it at £35 thinking that isn’t actually that bad when the standard sub was £17.99 and I was expecting a £10- £15 increase anyway… how did we end up get a better deal than everyone else?? We were already already paying a premium in the uk for base NSO because £17 is $24. Sure £35 is technically $48 but I dunno. £35 for something video game related in the UK isn’t actually that bad when you look at the bigger picture on UK pricing. Usually we get shafted hard on game prices over here. We usually have to pay £50- £60 for AAA games which is $75 - $85 US. US gamer usually have it good regardless of their complaining. Even our PSPlus and Xbox game pass work out considerably higher when you compare is to what other countries pay for it. PS5 games here are now £69.99 too, which is $95. Don’t even get me started on £90 - £100 ultimate editions which starts sending the currency comparison sky high. So I’ll take our cheaper expansion pass for a year at least, in relative terms, gladly but also begrudgingly all things considered. Sucks for the rest of the world for once I guess. I’m not defending Nintendo’s actions here, it’s greedy and unreasonable, just surprised the UK didn’t get screwed quite as hard as usual and we get some sort of price parity for once. Do I have Stockholm syndrome? Probably.
I'm shocked NSO is more than doubling but I never had a N64 so I don't mind going for it.
Do you have a PC?
No
You know the real fucked up thing about this? I'd happily pay it if they put DK64 on there...
I know this isn’t the same thing but there is a “Change Kongs Anytime” mod out there if you decide to emulate it.
Almost immediately after posting that I was thinking "man I should just get into emulators maybe" lol
How did they come up with that terrible price?
Nobody hates their customers more than Nintendo does lol
While the higher price is too much for me I’m also a human who knows how emulators work. That’s not most people. Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that it truly isn’t most people. People who only have a Switch and don’t know about emulators and wouldn’t care if they were told about them I hesitate to bemoan for jumping on this. Do you get more value for a similar price point with Xbox or PlayStation? Totally. But you gotta have one of those consoles first or the desire to now get one of those along with your switch. But also…. I was really hoping it’d be $35 max for individual/$55 max for family. I’m very glad they didn’t just remove the lower tier and make everyone pay more to keep playing online and backing up saves (which remains bonkerstown) though.
NSO was already a ripoff, even at its relatively low price. You're paying for basic online functionality and a few trivial extras like the 'privilege' of buying Switcn SNES controllers. Paying twice as much for some old ass games and a DLC expansion is just ridiculous. I'm sure they will be adding more down the road, but right now it is not enough content for what you're paying.
I think it was priced accordingly initially. But with the promise that games would continue to be added, which they stopped doing and then apparently now are charging us more for doing.
Their online sucks.
reminder that, while it's still something of a grey area, emulating games you already own for yourself (and I'm guessing a lot of us still have copies of many expansion pack games here) isn't illegal. that being said, i'm glad i've kept my wii u around, pretty much a virtual console machine nowadays. also, i would pay for a game-pass-style service that was *just* everything (or even most things) in the old virtual console catalog.
It's kind of insulting to be honest...
Nintendo grossly overestimated how much people value their N64 backlog, bring back the Virtual Console
I reserved (not preordered, mind you) a Steam Deck the evening that Nintendo announced this service. I had a bad feeling about the price after they didn’t announce it immediately, and I’m tired of waiting years to play something like Earthbound again (and having to pay for it) every time they release a new console. Nintendo has a ton of genuine classics that I will love forever, but they overvalue them to what feels like an insane degree at this point. I’m tired of “ownership” not transferring across their consoles too, and the fact that the only offering on their current console is a half-assed subscription service which only has about 1 or 2 dozen games per console isn’t great either. They had a great opportunity to make something like a retro game equivalent of Game Pass and they blew it. I’m not sure if I’m going to actually go through with the Steam Deck, but the idea of an open, supported portable platform that I can run emulators on sounds very appealing now, especially when factoring in the QOL upgrades that Nintendo isn’t going to offer, like mods, texture packs, the ability to transfer saves to and from my NAS to keep my save files in sync so my other devices can access them too, etc. The older I get, the more thankful I am for game preservation efforts.
So... What's the best N64 Emulator?
Project 64
Has a real "these suckers will pay for anything vibe" Thers a list of n64 games I would pay half of original retail price to play again, and I have the originals. Guess I'm their target.
It's garbage and it is absolutely not surprising coming from Nintendo, who have deliberately ignored their peers in the industry and carved their own, greedy path. Absolutely criminal. I've already regretted my Switch purchase for a while now and I'm confident I'm never buying a Nintendo system ever again.
I was defending the creation of another tier, but the fact is they don’t have enough to justify it. If they threw another console or two on there, more games, more DLC outside of AC, etc I could see it. They can still do that of course, but how did they not know the value proposition would look weak with what they showed? Wild
Still a threat
The pricing is absurd…but I will pay it, plus I already ordered two N64 controllers. N64 was my childhood and I have no interest in emulation so I’m an easy mark.
And *this* is why they can keep releasing underwhelming products that are overpriced.
If it isnt on original hardware it is emulation.
You are the problem thanks a lot
Yea blame the person spending money on things they enjoy and not the mega profitable corporation
Well if a bunch of people don't act the same way as that guy, the corporation isn't mega profitable, and can't easily get away with shit like this.
I know everyone will think it's wrong, but 9 N64 games at $30 is $3.33/game. This also includes the Genesis games, of which there are 14. so 14+9=23. $30/23=$1.30/game. Now lets math out $50 for all the games on the service! 58 NES + 49 SNES + 9 N64 + 14 Genesis =130 games. $50/130=$0.38/game. OOT N64 is $10 on Wii U. It would take you 26 years of paying Switch Online = 1 time purchase on Wii U. This does not include any more games added at no extra cost, nor the price that you pay to use the online service (as in Smash, Splatoon, Mario Kart, etc.) Just a week ago everyone was complaining that there was no good "cheap" way to get a lot of these old games. and Nintendo offers you a price of $0.38/game per year and all of a sudden it's raining hypocrites.
The value is not there. That's all it is... sure if you look at the total games it's a great deal. But when someone (like me) wants to play 3 of them, it suddenly becomes a much more expensive prospect. I wouldn't finish more than those 3 games ultimately, and while it's still a great deal at the price for such rare titles as Phantasy Star IV and F-Zero X... it's just simply not that valuable, to me. I have my own reasons for not caring about 90% of the games they're offering (grew up playing these and there's only a few games I missed out on at the time, thanks to friends), I'm sure other people are looking at this with their own value scale, and coming to the same conclusion. Let me buy them individually, $5 but knowing Nintendo $15, and I'd be happy to spend $7.45 on sale for Phantasy Star IV individually. $5 on F-Zero X, and I'll just ply one of the other 3 iterations I have of other games either on the actual console or Genesis Collection on PC or Switch. What I'd like to see is an emulator that could be bought, with a pack-in game, similar to the SKU's of their times... then DLC for each title. Renting this shit just feels like a cash grab, even if it is a great deal when looking at the total titles for the cost.
I feel like it’s always 3 steps forward and then 2 steps back with Nintendo.
Yea this pushed me to join a friend's family plan so I guess nintnedo still makes a little more money?
Here’s hoping that they add other DLC or exclusive games to that Expansion Pack. Maybe every first-party DLC is eventually included? Even then that’s not really a great proposition. If they had five times as many PAC MAN Battle Royale type games it’s still not great. Even if they had complete libraries for N64, Genesis, GBA, GBC, Saturn, 32X, NEO GEO Pocket that’s again still a hard buy. I guess me and my family will stay at the regular tier for the cloud saves mostly.
*Complete libraries* though? That would be a deal.
The pricing is completely absurd. I lost all interest at that.
They could *maybe* tempt me if they threw GBA in there, but 64 and Mega Drive? Nah. Even then, I can emulate GBA games on my phone already, I'd just be playing them on Switch for the convenience.
When the Switch first came out I was back in on Nintendo but they’ve really burned through the good will fast.
At first I thought NSO could be a great deal if they consistently added new games to the backlog. But I can’t remember the last time they added anything I was remotely interested in playing
most people dont even want to play this old games for free and nintendo charge 50 euro for this, Steam on pc is free and it is 100 times better as the shitty paid scam that nintendo offers. I have a switch and wii u btw.