Nintendo has a huge back catalog of older games that are no longer possible to find physically, that also aren't available on Digital. They are missing out on alot of money because of this. Take the older Pokemon games for instance, all of the physical copies of these that were produced were sold, so we just have used copies getting passed back and forth at increasingly higher prices, and Nintendo gets no money out of that since they are used copies.
I find myself wanting to play Heartgold or Soulsilver currently since I didn't own a DS originally and therefore have never played them before, but it is impossible to find an actual legit used copy for less than $80, double what they cost when they were new, so pretty much my only choices for playing it are an illegal ROM download on my PC or an illegal Chinese reproduction copy for about $25 on eBay. Nintendo could release these older Pokemon games, and many other older games that are no longer available physically, on the Switch eShop and make good money selling them for $10-20. But they don't, the last old Pokemon that got a digital release were the Red/Blue/Yellow digital ports for the 3DS eShop 4 years ago. They sold pretty well for old games, 1.5m in the first month, yet Nintendo never released the other older Pokemon games on the eshop, like Gold/Silver/Crystal, Sapphire/Ruby/Emerald, FireRed/LeafGreen, Diamond/Pearl/Platinum, HeartGold/SoulSilver, Black/White, and Black 2/White 2, so those games are all lost in the ether now, highly sought after collectibles that can no longer be purchased for a reasonable price through official channels.
Switch specs should easily be able to emulate systems like NES/SNES/N64/GBA/DS, maybe even Gamecube, so it probably wouldn't be too hard to get these older games running on Switch so that they could make some digital bank off of them.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 08 June 2020