Switch Online NES Is a Smart Move

The Nintendo Switch currently gives you access to roughly 20 NES games if you pay for the online service. Whatever your thoughts on the service are, it makes great sense for Nintendo financially, even compared to the previous iterations of the Virtual Console.

For $20 per year you have access to as much Mario Bros 3, Legend of Zelda, and Dr Mario you want (for that year). This sounds fine, but that's assuming all of the other (roughly) 17 games hold up to the same standard. And as anyone who knows the NES library knows, that isn't likely.

The NES has mixed quality, but saying mixed is a bit generous. The NES library reeks of unfamiliar hardware, and the developers showed it. This resulted in games that, at the time, were quite advanced, but nowadays you'd have a hard time selling.

That's why Nintendo was smart to bundle 20 of those games together. They can get people interested in the service with games like Mario, Zelda, and a bit later Metroid, but they can also advertise that there's many more games, so you assume the quality will be good, or at least passable on all of them.

The moral of the story is that Nintendo was smart to make NES Baseball a bullet point rather than a $5 game on the Virtual Console.

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