There is a person who has bought and downloaded all the games released on the 3DS and Wii U recently through the eShop. The cost alone was 22,791 dollars, or about 30 million won. The purchase period alone took almost a year. It can be evaluated as an ordinary collector’s stroke, but there is a reason why he suddenly collects gems by spending a lot of money. This is because if the eShop is closed in March, it will be impossible to add money or buy 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 needed to buy the game will be blocked, and the service will end 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 shops to buy gift cards. Carril and a colleague bought 464 gift cards and registered them by entering the code one by one. Even so, if you registered too many codes at once, it was registered as an inappropriate account, and I even made a call to Nintendo Support Channel to unlock it.
Buying wasn’t easy either. The response speed and download speed of the eShop was slow, and I had to delete every 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 didn’t list all the DLC on the eShop, so I had to turn the game on one by one and come from up to additional content. It hasn’t taken 328 days to download it all.
You might be wondering why you are spending money and time on an old game that you don’t enjoy anyway. However, the action seems different in that it doesn’t stop at just possessing the game, but leaves it as data and records it as history.
Online marketplaces such as Steam approach the purchase of games as a sort of rental concept. Companies will close the shop themselves if it is not profitable and notify him early. It’s not like they shut down the service 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 sight to end the store with a usage rate low
However, in the case of the 3DS, where the eShop is closed, it is still confusing whether the Nintendo Switch can be considered as a successor to a standalone handheld device. In addition, Nintendo, a major games company that has already operated for about 10 years, has closed the eShop, leaving the possibility that other platforms that have operated for a similar longer period choose to terminate the online market service.
The bigger worry is that the recent move 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. The 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 just enjoying the moment.
In particular, since the game itself is digital content, efforts to leave the game digital continue. It is a way of leaving games in a digital format that is easy to copy and save, beyond physical constraints that are vulnerable to damage and difficult to store permanently, such as game packages such as cartridges and optical discs. Microsoft was also actively building backwards compatibility into its latest console, the Xbox Series X, and implementing continuity across the entire Xbox platform by improving the frames and textures of older games.
Online marketplaces such as e-shops are also seen as the easiest way for users to access games as digital records. That’s probably why Nintendo fans, as well as the entire industry, are voicing their dismay. Between reasonable corporate management and the responsibility of recording game history as a major game company that fans love.
With the support of funding and game fans, Khalil, who has completed a year-long game save 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, an organization that does not profit base. So that the game will be remembered as history, not just a Wikipedia line.
