I've been thinking about the 3DS eshop closing in a year and it got me wondering about what's going to happen to all the old games that were on the console, like the GB/GBC games. There's lots of people who downloaded games like Pokemon Red and Gold to their 3DS and they won't be able to re download them while people without digital copies won't be able to buy them.

So what happens next? Does Nintendo release them as part of Online? Do they port them as individual games or collections and have some people pay yet again for them? Do they just let those games die?

Thoughts?

zanderlex : Some of them will definitely be remade for the swtich, but ultimately the majority of eshop exclusives will be preserved via homebrew. It's a great time to hack your 3ds that's for sure!

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I think that the highest sellers & most praised games on the Nintendo 3DS library will be transferred to the switch. But when the entire eshop closes on the 3DS, the good titles that Nintendo doesn't recognize will be left out. The only example I can think of is Fantasy Zone 2 DX W, that game is good in my opinion, but not good "enough" for it to be transferred to switch. I don't even think Sega is willing to transfer that game to switch!

The first phase of the eshop closing down has begun a little while ago and the second phase is about to begin next week, so starting very soon it's going to be very difficult to acquire some of these games that are strictly on the 3DS and haven't been ported. Right now you can only use eshop cards to add funds to a 3DS and that will be removed in less than 8 months.

I'm really hoping that a lot of the 3DS exclusives get a port or that Nintendo announces that 3DS games will go on sale BEFORE they lock funding so that people will know whether or not they should be buying eshop cards.

I mean if it involves the Pokémon games I don’t know how they would handle such heavy losses… especially when I grew up with Gen 1 and Gen 2…. I mean I own Yellow and Crystal but I’m gonna see how Nintendo is going to release the handheld games. I don’t really care for anything else to be honest

I really don't like that they're doing this and even Playstation tried pulling something similar only to see the outcry of the fans and end up doing nothing instead, personally, I think it's because people brought a bunch of games and they saw how profitable it could still be for them. I hope that a similar situation will happen here too but I doubt it so I recommend getting what you can while you can before it's too late.

I think Nintendo leaves most of these old games to die unfortunately I don't have any faith in them when it comes to preserving their classic games I think the series that likely suffers the most for this is Pokemon however since the Gen 1 and 2 games are once again going to be lost to time to anyone who doesn't have them downloaded. I know it's not really talked about here as it's not in the title but to my understanding isn't the Wii U eshop also closing at the same time? I know for most people this probably doesn't affect much cause Nintendo actually cared about saving most of it's Wii U library when the Switch came out but there are some games that will be lost from the Wii U like Xenoblade Chronicles X for people who will eventually wanna play this game they won't have access to the high-speed data packs put out for this game which I hear vastly affects gameplay and load times for the game which is quite upsetting cause I haven't been able to get Xenoblade Chronicles X up to this point and I fear I could lose the optimal experience playing the game if I'm too slow. The Wii U eshop shutting down also means the last of the virtual console on the eshop is dying as well unfortunately so I would say hopefully Nintendo let's people buy their old games on the switch but I'm not getting my hopes up.