We’ve heard lots of whispers about Nintendo’s eventual online service, and now the thing finally has a date: it will be here in September, more than a full year after the Switch’s original launch. The online service will cost $20 a year and marks Nintendo’s first foray into charging for online play. We’ll wait to see how it works when it arrives in September, but most of the questions revolve around the accompanying smartphone app, and just how that will work alongside the Switch itself — the Lovecraftian setup required for microphone chat in Splatoon 2 isn’t exactly encouraging.
The real question here is the classic games library, and just what exactly that will look like. We know that subscribers will be getting access to a suite of classic NES games like Super Mario Bros. 3, Balloon Fight and Dr. Mario, and that these games will be updated with online functionality. And while we’ve only heard about NES games so far, SNES games are not impossible, as well. It’s not a lot of information to go on, but in the past Nintendo has appeared to downplay expectations after people began dreaming of a subscription-based Virtual Console.
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Free games now come standard with premium online subscriptions: both Xbox Live and PSN give subscribers a monthly dose of free titles, and Microsoft has dramatically expanded the concept with a $10 a month game pass that gives players access to 100+ games, that will soon include new first-party releases. Nintendo’s service is cheaper than those, and the free games included so far appear to match the lower price tag. But the specifics still feel up in the air, and they may not even be finalized at Nintendo HQ: how many games will we be getting? Will they rotate? Will other classic games be available for purchase? What about newer old games, like those from the Gamecube and N64 eras? The Nintendo Switch increasingly looks to define the company in the coming years, and these questions will need to be answered.
As Erik Kain mentioned, there’s a degree of competition with the NES Classic Edition, the SNES Classic Edition, and any future tiny consoles Nintendo might want to put out. I wonder how much this actually applies, however: these little nostalgia boxes are both game consoles and little physical curiosities all of their own, and there still feels like huge populations of people that might want an NES but probably won’t buy a Switch — though playing the NES might make them wonder what Nintendo is up to these days. In any case, making these games available for purchase in more than one place could really only increase the number of people who purchase them.
What the Nintendo Switch needs is some sort of game pass that includes both smaller and larger titles from Nintendo’s past alongside a robust library of classic games for purchase. It seems like such a slam dunk that it’s still sort of impossible to figure out why we’ve heard literally nothing about it yet, but it doesn’t mean we won’t do so in the future. That’s what everyone was talking about when the subscription service was first made public, and it’s possible Nintendo used that as an opportunity to reassess how it would handle classic gaming on the Switch. That’s the hope, at least.