This is a topic that has been debated for years now and is once again a hot topic, let's address it here where we can ask questions, express opinions, and analyize the numbers. When Nintendo Online was first announced for $20 a year, people generally seemed to be fine with that price point. We got an okay selection of NES games as well as promise of better internet than we had with Wii/Wii U/3ds (not great, but better). Then they added, for free, more NES games (making that library move from okay to decent, not good or great, but decent), cloud saves, and a decent amount of SNES games. That brings us to now:
N64 + Genesis games announced for an additional fee. People are either supportive of it or quite vocal against it, thinking Nintendo should have added the tier for free to the current $20 plan. This brings me to a big question I'd like to ask:
How much would you be willing to pay a year to get access to a growing list of games from their entire library prior to current gen?
I don't think it is realistic to expect Nintendo to put their current system on a plan like Gamepass does, but I do think their longterm goal is to put popular games from all of their previous systems on the service one day (probably won't totally get there until Switch 2 due to Switch 1's limited internal storage).
So again, how much would you be willing to pay? I pay $10 a month for Gamepass PC (which includes a lot of newer games, but very limited selection of older MS owned games). Gamepass has saved me over $1000 so far on games I don't have to purchase. Nintendo's service is more the opposite, lot's of old content with no new content, so they kind of balance each other out, so I'll just use $10 as an example. Gamepass owners are paying roughly $120 a year for access to more games than they could possibly have time to play. Would you be willing to pay the same amount for every system Nintendo owned? Is it more valuable than $120 a year, about good, or less valuable? If you are good with $120, then here is how you could breakdown the tiers:
Tier 1 - $20 year, NES/SNES/Cloud Saves/Better Online than previous gens.
Tier 2 - $40 (total a year), tier 1 benefits, N64/Genesis at launch, added GB/GBC down the road.
Tier 3 - $60 (total a year), tier 1-2 benefits, GameCube, GBA.
Tier 4 - $80 (total a year), tier 1-3 benefits, Wii/DS
Tier 5 - $100 (total a year), tier 1-4 benefits, Wii U/3ds
Tier 6 - $120 (total a year), tier 1-5 benefits, Switch (won't come until Switch 2 is out).
Personally, I think above would be an absolutely amazing deal that would save us all a lot of money (unless you just don't play more than a few games a year). When I look at the numbers above, and see the complaints people have about spending more on N64, I just don't get that perspective. There is no way Nintendo is going to stop at N64. We didn't know for certain we were going to get SNES added to tier 1 when it was first came out, all we had were rumors and empty white space on images that made it seem like another system would be added. I'm sure Nintendo will add a lot more games and maybe another system at that tier, but then they will keep adding tiers and I think that's great. I'm personally excited about the future of these tiers!
