Honesty I understand the whole licenses stuf did not made it easy, but this really took a long ass time.
Nope. Pretty sure Nintendo would have been able to release
all their NSO games as soon as the individual NSO console title launched.
There's three reasons why they didn't do it though:
- If all games would have been available from the start, people would have had "decision paralysis", playing only a few minutes of each game, then going back to actual modern Switch games and don't ever touch NSO again (while this applies not to everyone, it applies to the majority at least).
- Adding on top of #1, if the NSO retro games were one of the big reasons for you to subscribe (and pay) but you have all games at hand that you want from the get go, you play around with them for maybe 1 or 2 months until you played through all your Zeldas and what not. Then you're done and you think "I don't need NSO any longer". Needless to say, Ninty doesn't ever want you to think that way. By "releasing" (lol) new games every few months, they give you a reason to stay subscribed.
- While #2 may sound like the main argument since it's a direct conversion to their $$$ incomings, I think this last reason is even the most important one for them:
Whenever they "release" (again, lol) new games to their NSO services, literally any video game focussed site writes news like this one here. It's goddamn FREE ADVERTISING. They don't pay any news site to write about it, they don't need to. They just add 2 games, release a YouTube video and every news site is more than happy to have another news settled and every consumer (that's us) are happy to get pinged/informed, in case we would have missed it otherwise. Thus it is practically a win-win-win situation (especially for Nintendo).
These are just facts. Personally I'm super annoyed by Nintendo doing it this way. If they actually released a
Virtual Console game every few months, that you can pay for
once and (theoretically) keep forever, that'd be fine.
But NSO sucks as Nintendo is holding back games they could have provided already. And because access will be gone in a few years when Nintendo
decides to end the service. And it's also stupid that if I pay for NSO for 12 months, I get to play Mario Kart 64 for the full 12 months, but Banjo Tooie only for one months, since... you know... it just was released one month before my subscription ended.
Thank god there's Atmosphère and RetroArch.
