There is a person who recently purchased and downloaded all the games released on the 3DS and Wii U through the eShop. The cost alone was $22,791, or about 30 million won. The purchase period alone took almost a year. It can be evaluated as a common collector’s stroke, but there is a reason why he suddenly collected games by spending a lot of money. This is because if the eShop is closed in March, it will be impossible to add funds or purchase games.
Nintendo announced the end of the eShop service for the 3DS and Wii U in 2022. And in August, the purchase of the balance required to purchase the game will be blocked, and the service will be terminated on March 28th. This is why Girard Carril, who runs The Completionist, a game channel, left a record of buying and saving games for 328 days and made it public.
The number of titles that need to be purchased, organized by Carril, reached 1,547 for the 3DS and 866 for the Wii U. Unlike today’s e-shops, which can be easily obtained by registering card information, in the past, e-shops had to register the balance separately, so they went to offline stores to buy gift cards. Khalil and his colleagues bought 464 gift cards and registered them by entering the code on each one. Even that, if you registered too many codes at once, it was registered as an inappropriate account, and I even made a call to the Nintendo Support Channel to unlock it.
Buying wasn’t easy either. The eShop response speed and download speed were slow, and I had to delete each game from my device after receiving a certain number. The Wii U was able to find the DLC on the individual game page, but the 3DS did not list all the DLC on the eShop, so I had to turn on the game one by one and find additional content. It’s not that it took 328 days to download them all.
You may be wondering why you spend money and time on an old game you don’t enjoy anyway. However, the act seems different in the sense that it does not stop at just possessing the game, but leaves it as data and records it as history.
Online markets such as Steam approach purchasing games as a kind of rental concept. Companies will close the store itself if it is not profitable and notify it early. It’s not like they’re shutting down the service just a few months after launch. Since the 3DS and Wii U, 12 and 11 years after their release, have already been released, Nintendo’s new device, the Nintendo Switch, is a reasonable decision at first glance to discontinue the store with a low usage rate.
However, in the case of the 3DS, where the eShop is closed, it is still puzzling whether the Nintendo Switch can be seen as a successor to a standalone handheld device. In addition, Nintendo, a large game company that has already operated for about 10 years, has closed the eShop, leaving the possibility that other platforms that have operated for a similarly longer period choose to terminate the service of the online market.
The bigger regret is that the recent movement to leave the history of the game has grown. Embracer Group is creating a separate game archiving department and preparing a center to store European games. Nexon Computer Museum, as well as non-profit organizations such as The Strong and the Video Game History Foundation, record and preserve the game beyond simply enjoying the moment.
In particular, as the game itself is digital content, efforts to leave the game digital are continuing. It is a way to leave games in a digital format that is easy to copy and preserve, beyond physical limitations that are vulnerable to damage and difficult to store permanently, such as game packs such as cartridges and optical discs. Microsoft also actively included backward compatibility in its latest console, the Xbox Series X, and implemented continuity across the entire Xbox platform by improving frames and textures of older games.
Online markets such as e-shops are also considered the easiest way for users to access games as digital records. That’s probably why Nintendo fans, as well as the industry as a whole, voice their regrets. Between reasonable corporate management and the responsibility of recording game history as a large game company loved by fans.
With the support of funding and game fans, Khalil, who has completed a year-long game saving schedule with only a week left before the end of the eShop, donates the data collected in this way to the video game history foundation, a non-profit foundation. So that the game will be remembered as history, not just a Wikipedia line.