Nintendo’s decision Close both the Wii U and 3DS eShops may make good business sense for the company, but for fans and lovers of video game history, it is catastropheas feared Many of the removed games will disappear and never be seen or made available again.
Why game archivists fear the 3DS/Wii U eShop shutdown this month
This excellent article at Ars Technica last week delves into this whole tragedy, it’s well worth reading if you’re at all interested.
A lot of these games are tiny little indie things that probably haven’t been bought or heard in years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth preserving! Also, some of the disappearing games are big, important releases. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Wakerfor example, the prestigious winner of My Favorite Video Game Of All Time, will no longer be legally and commercially available once the Wii U eShop closes.
To address this – or at least address it in a single place on as few consoles as possible – YouTuber The Completionist decided to sit down and spend almost a year of his life (328 days total) buying through both libraries.
He’s done now and the stats are amazing. The guy bought 866 Wii U games and 1547 3DS titles, numbers that include DSiWare, Virtual Console releases and downloadable content. That adds up to 1.2TB of data for the Wii U and 267GB for the 3DS. Or, for the 3DS purists, 2,136,689 blocks.
All of those purchases used over 460 eShop cards, and he spent a whopping $22,791 in total. If you want to see how it all came together, the video below explains the whole process:
If you’re wondering what’s happening with all this stuff now The executor says at the end of the video that he’s donating everything he’s downloaded to the Video Game History Foundation (although as an organization that traditionally only deals with physical media, and with digital games that pose legal challengesWhat Strictly speaking what happens to all downloads in the long run is still unclear).
