^This. I'm sick of Nintendo's Disney vault bullshit. Sure that guy was profiting off his piracy, but Nintendo's also in the wrong because they're not even trying to give adequate legal alternatives to ROM sites. Even Konami is doing what Nintendo won't do, and they're still in the public's cross-hairs for reducing many of their own IPs to pachinko machines and fucking over Hideo Kojima.

Sure, Nintendo did a compilation cartridge for Switch, but once again they went the Disney route and made it a limited release. -_-

Shareholders are just a bunch of prunes in suits who don't give a shit about gamers, and no, Nintendo doesn't know what they're doing. If they did know what they're doing then we'd have Virtual Console on Switch instead of a substandard subscription system with an increasingly lackluster catalogue. Seriously, Switch Online went from the Donkey Kong Country trilogy to Jelly Boy, and without Earthbound or Super Mario RPG, which is brings the conclusion that they're out of touch.

BC was always a thing with Xbox, the handfull xbox games that you could buy digitally were available to play on your 360 with your account and the bc 360 program was in the works while the 360 was doing great.  The Wii was praised for its VC so criticising the Switch for not having it is fair. I really don't understand how people can call 'the ability to play games you bought before on your new console' a weakness. It should be mandatory by now.

I wish Nintendo had better policies on allowing people to keep the games they've already bought. My 3DS recently suffered severe damage and won't turn on, and even though I'll be using the exact same account as before I've lost all of my digital purchases because since the old system won't turn on there's no way to transfer any of my purchases or save data. Even spot-pass is back to square 1 and there's no one to pass with to get diorama pieces anymore.

This is why I hack my Nintendo consoles only, I'm glad to pay for xbox and ps games. Reasons are

1 - No sales, most good games on Nintendo are still the same price years after.

2 - Some games I already paid for, Ill have to pay again even more than what I originally paid, such as Zelda skyward sword, pikmin 3, mario kart 8 and many others, some of those are not even improved graphically coming from my wiiU

3 - Digital games are tied to the console, not the account, so if my console goes bust, I lose everything, hence why I never ever buy digital on Nintendo consoles.

4 - Some switch games don't even come complete on the cart, because of lack of storage on it, Blurays are 50gb, sd cards are like 16gb, maybe less

5 - Games on Nintendo are not worth full price, because they cant compare graphically and performance wise to the competition, I didnt want a portable, I dont have time to play portable, I only play when I get home, so the switch is severely underpowered compared to my ps5 and even my xbox one X, why would I pay 70 euros for a game on switch in 1080p or less, that is available for 40 euros on the other consoles in 4k?

6 - Switch might be a cheaper console, but you really need a pro controller to compete with the other consoles, and that brings the price up to the same.

7 - Disappointing games, the only brand new first party game worth full price is Mario odyssey for the whole generation. Breath of the wild doesn't count as its the exact same as the wiiU, the rest are ports that look no better than the wiiU, or overpriced remasters, or terrible remakes such as link to the past which is not even worth my time, let alone any money. There's no new pikmin, no new wave race, no new 3d donkey kong, no new mario kart, no new zelda, no new metroid prime, no new star fox, and other games such as smash bros, mario tennis, yoshi etc are nowhere near worth full price because they didnt change much from previous versions, its basically copy and paste, with hd graphics.

Until Nintendo fixes these issues, Ill be glad to continue with my hacked switch, even the new Switch OLED is not reason to upgrade, because its exactly the same if you only play on the TV.

When they release a Switch 2 with all games in 4K or close to it. with either a decent controller or a good price on the console, and brand new games

Shareholders are just a bunch of prunes in suits who don't give a shit about gamers, and no, Nintendo doesn't know what they're doing. If they did know what they're doing then we'd have Virtual Console on Switch instead of a substandard subscription system with an increasingly lackluster catalogue. Seriously, Switch Online went from the Donkey Kong Country trilogy to Jelly Boy, and without Earthbound or Super Mario RPG, which is brings the conclusion that they're out of touch.

Shareholders are just a bunch of prunes in suits who don't give a shit about gamers, and no, Nintendo doesn't know what they're doing. If they did know what they're doing then we'd have Virtual Console on Switch instead of a substandard subscription system with an increasingly lackluster catalogue. Seriously, Switch Online went from the Donkey Kong Country trilogy to Jelly Boy, and without Earthbound or Super Mario RPG, which is brings the conclusion that they're out of touch.

That person was making money out of literal piracy, what did you expect Nintendo to do

Having said that I wish the Virtual Console came back.

See, it's this kind of reply that just makes me shake my head. To start, Nintendo has had virtual console on three different systems (Wii, 3DS, and Wii U). They have the data for the profit margins of those services compared to the licensing and other fees. Clearly it wasn't incredibly profitable, otherwise we WOULD have those services. Instead they've gone a different route: subscription based services. They are now using these games as an incentive to get people to subscribe to their network fee. They've been trickling in games to maintain interest (hence why they actually had to add games like Donkey Kong Country instead of having everything available from day one). 

As for why there aren't games like Earthbound and Mario RPG, to start their are parts of those properties that aren't wholly owned by Nintendo. They may have to pay royalties to certain individuals. Characters that were created by an individual need to be accredited, and especially music from composers. For Super Mario RPG, Nintendo might not even have complete ownership of that IP as, from what I understand, Paper Mario is, in part, not called Super Mario RPG 2 due to legal issues with Square Enix (Squaresoft at the time).  

Even if the above ISN'T the case, people are more likely to resubscribe to a service as more content becomes available. For example, someone may have subscribed for the Donkey Kong Trilogy, even if just for a month, then cancelled once they were done. When/if they announce Earthbound that person might subscribe again just to play that game. Maybe it sounds silly to you, but it's certainly possible. 

In sum, yes Nintendo absolutely knows what they are doing. They are the most consistently profitable gaming company out of the three even when the others are getting SIGNIFICANTLY more revenue. Their decisions are calculated. If this subscription model turns out to not be as profitable as their Virtual Console business you can bet they will bring that back.