Gold -used- to be decent when we got 4 games per month. - But two of them were Original Xbox or Xbox 360 titles... Which you could keep using even when your subscription expired.

That was good value in my eyes... But when you compare that to PC where you get free games weekly via epic store and don't need a subscription at all? Yikes. Shafted.

I think that's the biggest issue I have, you don't keep these titles, eventually the online stores will close (Looks at 3DS and WiiU) and you won't be able to play them anymore.

Sorry to bust in but you certainly still can play the downloaded games on these systems, you just can't buy more.

Xbox One and Series X games become unplayable once your Gold subscription expires.

3DS and Wii U games you bought digitally can still be played after the eshop closes though. They also can be redownloaded just like is still the case on the Wii.

Emulators, will not particularly legal, are way better.

But if you aren't into retro games there is no reason to complain about the expansion pack because you aren't going to be interested in it anyway and nobody is making these people buy it. In which case you can just pay the insanely cheap $20/year if all you want to do is play online - which is so cheap it'd be silly to complain about that even if you don't play any of the NES, SNES, GB games that make the basic NSO subscription just an insanely good deal.

I'd say the only real valid criticisms are that Nintendo needs to work on its online infrastructure because occasionally people experience lag (or like me if you use AT&Ts mobile network as your internet you can't play even play online because their NAT type doesn't allow Nintendo's P2P gaming but just the retro games is worth the price of the Expansion Pack so I have it), but the main complaint would have to be Nintendo's desire to keep people from interacting online - having to connect through friend codes, no way to message friends, only voice chat through a mobile app, etc. None of those things have to do with the expansion pack or the price.

Yeah some people complain because they want to buy overpriced retro digital games like how the VC was, rather than pay a cheap annual membership for entire library of games, but third parties put out collections of old games digitally on the Switch so it's not like you can't already buy tons of old games on the Switch already. I do think it would be nice in the eshop if Nintendo had a retro games section so companies could advertise their games there and make it easy for users to search through old games on the Switch by the system(s) they were on. And sure it would only make Nintendo more money if they added their own retro games digitally since buying those games cost way more than the NSO, but also companies tend to like subscriptions because of the reliability of the income they can make better forecasts on revenue.

I guess my point is the service is so cheap that unless there are only a few games in the entire library of old Nintendo games that you want to play the NSO is much more cost effective for users and the features (access to all the games, online play with friends, plus online Switch gameplay) are much better than the VC was so the reasons to complain are very niche, while people on this website seem to make the very niche complaints into like so huge deal that they never get tired of shouting about no matter how many more games and systems are added. I think the people who are still complaining just complained at the launch for legitimate reasons (the N64 emulator was crap and there weren't enough games at launch to really be worth the extra $30 a year but of course everyone knew that would change soon) and they are just being stubborn and refuse to accept the fact that the emulator has been fixed for a year now and over twice as many N64 games and I think 3 times as many Genesis games now, plus GBA (and GB on basic subscription) making the main reason for complaining at launch completely irrelevant now.

IIRC they're legal in the EU if you own a copy of the game.

Don't quote me on that though, heard it a long time ago and even at the time that I believe it was in reference to physical copies of the games. Not 100% sure it's true, or if it would apply to games you bought digitally as well as physically.

I think it's at the same time worth it and anti consumer

It's worth it because the price is reasonable to the amount of content you get

But it's anti consumer because it do not allow you to purchase or even subscribe to some games without paying for the others

I love subscriptions, but I dislike them to be mandatory. Imagine you have an album from an artist you really like and you cannot buy them individually because the artist now only release the copies in a bundle with other 20 discs you don't care at all changing 5 times. While it's a good deal (you're getting 20x more music) it still pretty bad because you're still paying 5x to listen to only one of them