But you just said their big games like Sonic, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Castlevania could remain multiplatform so give me some examples of the games that are big enough for Nintendo to spend millions/billions on.

I was talking about Nintendo, not consumers. How is Nintendo paying for old games to be exclusive on their platform thinking ahead?

Your numbers make no sense, in this hypothetical scenario sure Konami, Sega, etc are probably making more money on these games but why in the hell would Nintendo spend ~$1 billion/year on a bunch of 20-40 year old games? People aren’t going to buy Nintendo hardware or subscribe to Nintendo services specifically for these games so it doesn’t make them any money.

Well you are kinda contradicting yourself here. You say its anti consumer to make these bunch of 20-40 year old games nobody cares about exclusive to Nintendo consoles. So if they are basically worthless, then Nintendo could spend way less on them then. Give them 1 dollar per subscriber if they are that worthless.

Thinking ahead is when consoles are faded out and streaming becomes the norm. Instead of subscribing to 5 services, we would have 1. I think they would be stronger together than on their own.

There is no contradiction, you’re just misunderstanding.

In general retro games sell to an existing user base, basically nobody is buying a console, PC, tablet or smartphone to play these old games but they might buy some old games on devices they own.

They are “basically worthless” in the sense that people aren’t going to go out and spend a few hundred dollars on a piece of hardware and a few hundred dollars for a subscription over the course of the systems life to play a bunch of games from the 80s/90s. It’s just existing Switch owners/NSO subscribers who would be playing these games so Nintendo isn’t really making any money off them, especially if they are paying hundreds of millions to Capcom/Square/Sega/Konami.

By making these games exclusive to a single platform, you’re not making the platform more valuable, you’re just limiting the amount of people who have access to these games.

That makes sense.

I just thought now that MS is pushing Gamepass to be this great deal with new games, I thought maybe Nintendo could be the place for retro games. I might have overestimated the value of these older games, but I still think theres something they could do with this. Maybe on a smaller scale. Nintendo doesnt seem to be very agressive when it comes to getting the bigger third party support for their online retro console service. If they could somehow make themselves seem like THE place for retro games, I think that could benefit them. Although they probably are one of the biggest already.

Well you would have all those games in one place though, for one price. Instead of individually paying for a fraction of the games on several different consoles. NSO prices are probably going up next gen no matter if they add content or not, so I think this would be a great way to make it have good value for your money.

Of course I understand that many dont care about older games and dont want to pay for it, but I think theres enough of us to make it very profitable for everyone involved. 

Maybe two tiers? One for like 10-20 bucks for online play and cloud saves and the 60 bucks one for that and the older games?

Maybe two tiers? One for like 10-20 bucks for online play and cloud saves and the 60 bucks one for that and the older games?

How about no to the lower tier?

Online play and cloud saves should seriously be part of the basics by now and not warrant any additional payments.

Also, 60 bucks for just older games is way too much, slash that price in half and we can talk about it.

I think you are overestimating the value of back catalogs. You may be interested in playing old games...

....but it is a *tiny* market. Otherwise wouldn't you be able to buy these games in the shops still? Games have a very short shelf life.