Is Nintendo Switch Online doing game preservation?

Published on 30 Sep 2025

Just to avoid wasting time: Yes, I think it is, but I understand why there would be many who wouldn’t agree. It might be hard to read as I just kind of improvise on this, so I might go a few tangents here and there, sorry.

What preservation is truly about

I believe the definition of “preservation” is not really the same for most people, and while I don’t think most definitions are necessarily wrong, to me it just feels incomplete when I try to take a peek into what others think of what it is. Some confuse it with piracy, some think companies cannot preserve by definition, some think since it’s in a subscription it’s therefore not preservation, some think if there’s no ownership it’s not preservation, and some confuse it with access. I could come up with more, but these are the stuff where I’m just kind of saying it’s too reductive.

I know for a fact that I will sound way over my head when I say this stuff but I really just think all forms of “preservation” are additive, as in everything that comes out will just add to a greater whole, and the only way it can remove from this whole is if something is lost while we still had time to preserve it, and mind you, companies can be directly responsible for that, but most of the time, when companies remove something from a store, it’s not really lost anyway if you rely on piracy these days.

Personally I just think ownership is just highly reductive and a wrong way to think about preservation if you rely on that, because all things are just kind of ephemeral anyway. The timespan is always relatively short (whether it’s yourself or the game), and preservation is more like just about extending this timespan. Does it matter if you legally own it in the grand scheme? Personally I just think what matters most is if we still have access regardless of legality, but preservation has always been more than that to me.

I do think “true” preservation cannot be done by companies since they are just motivated for themselves only, and is therefore always subject to change. Piracy will always be better when it’s not dependent on any companies’ bottom line, but I still think even if it’s not “true” preservation, it doesn’t mean that somehow we have to reject it, just because those companies are still doing something important: they’re making people aware of their history, even the history of others if they do that, and I’ll be very honest on this one, awareness is the one thing where all the help we could get is justified. Preservation means nothing if you’re not aware of the stuff it preserves. If you think there’s already enough awareness, you are in a closed circle and you never got out of it. You’d be surprised.

I take game access as the most important thing mostly because I like to play games! But it is also far from the only thing to do, and some things are also adjacent, like you still have to reverse engineer systems to make emulators with (please don’t take that shit for granted ffs), figure out all context like the box, manual, magazines, opinions, interviews, and WAY MORE, this is still historian stuff here, but just accepting only “true” preservation just feels wrong to me, it just means there’s even more material!

What truly matters

Many take importance on the subscription aspect of Nintendo Switch Online since the reality of it is that you don’t really own anything from that, and that’s definitely true. You’d be dependent on the company’s “goodwill” and I know many are just tired of that, justifiably. It’s just that I can’t say it’s not preservation, because I really just think if they did the old Virtual Console way, people would just mostly go to the same games. It’s not as much of preservation to me if the people are going towards the same popular games over and over. It’s unfortunately a part of the market’s reality though, and reality in general. A lack of money would not make people gravitate towards more risk to play different games, you’d just go towards the ones you know you would enjoy, and that’s normal. I do think however that piracy can largely solve that though, it’s how my knowledge of gaming grew, so I can hardly take a lack of money as an excuse in general.

The one frustrating part of it is when I see reactions to new games that no one knows about very well on Nintendo Switch Online, when they just don’t know the games, they think it’s shit and not worthwhile, even though these are still part of game history whether they like it or not, and dare I say that Nintendo actually is trying more to help on those games than people are willing to give them credit for. The future addition of Virtual Boy is, dare I say, actual evidence that they care a lot about it.

Personally I see Nintendo Switch Online as like, as if you had access to a legal ROM site and you could play everything listed in basically seconds, and it just works* (we’ll get to that later), it’s good for people who are not really familiar on old games, it’s good for people who aren’t tinkerers, it plays on the importance of awareness that I just talked about, and in all fairness, Xbox Game Pass does similar things, but I think its execution is not as good. If you are tinkerers who knows their way around an emulator, I’m not here to preach the use of NSO for you. If you prefer doing things your way, continue as usual. I just want people to recognize what NSO is doing, regardless of your stance on your use of it.

I don’t usually like resorting to the slippery slope kind of argument because it’s a lot of time overused and not justified, but I seriously admit that I fail to see major differences between buying games digitally and relying on subscriptions to play games. Online stores can just go down, and while most of them are still allowing redownloads (even the Wii!), the argument of subscriptions having essentially a secret expiration date just feels not really different from how people can just talk about the day redownloads won’t be possible, and while subscriptions can feel like short term (and in many ways they are)… the further we go, the further they seem to just “always” exist and doesn’t seem like expiring anytime soon, and to give credit where it is due, Nintendo Switch Online is somehow the one subscription that isn’t changing very much. Only one retro game was removed in 8 years, that seems like a record low to me. I just gave a defense to physical here, but imo physical is particularly still bad in comparison since you’re still dependent on the ecosystem of a console to use them.

My point about the last paragraph is that what matters is the data here, where I do think “true” preservation can be achieved on when you break the data free of the shackles of the console makers. This is the main reason why I still defend most subscriptions because it is not cloud based. They still leave a trace that we can directly use, and why cloud streaming is absolutely the devil to me. If cloud streaming gets forced on us (and personally I don’t believe it will for the next 20 years), this is the moment where I would quit modern gaming, even if Nintendo is doing it, because the moment companies become unwilling to let go of things, this is the moment we lose the war, and for me, it is non negociable.

And since piracy is still usually for doing it under the hood, actually let me go on that for a minute: Many many people should seriously be aware of how piracy is always kind of a war on companies when you’re part of the cogs, you can be mad when Nintendo closes down stuff, but being unwilling to accept that it’s part of the game, I would directly look at you weirdly. This is not an excuse to be a dick either, whether it’s about gloating on how you’re playing pirated games in front of everyone (you are seriously stupid if you do that, the goal is not to become a target ffs), or being part of the gatekeepers that prevents others to learn how to do it, like seriously, stop saying to Google things. This was a massive mistake. I do think the knowledge hasn’t been passed on properly, and it’s particularly worse when search engines are no longer as reliable.

Last words on Nintendo Switch Online

I said earlier that it’s like having a legal ROM site, so I’d like to detail more about it: Having a legal option is still helpful for awareness. It’s easier to share, it’s easier to play with. And obviously, as much as it just “works” it’s still having a lot of problems, my talks about how bad the N64 emulation is is pretty much a meme on my part at this point, since I do think preservation is also about respecting what the original games were like, seeing aliased HD N64 graphics as the default option is still something that I hate seeing, and Nintendo still needs to do a lot of effort on that, and I’ll still repeat on my death bed that the Switch 1 can do so much better.

Since the Switch 2 launch, in all fairness to them, they did do a lot of improvements, particularly in regards to how to make those games easier to play by finally including some sort of control explanation to every game, including the ability to change the controls (at least on those that are updated to Nintendo Classics name), I’ll give them credit for that because it still takes time to do that. I do think it is smart doing it this way, because I haven’t seen unofficial emulators do that for sure. As I said, it’s still a pretty good option for people who aren’t quite tinkerers, and I don’t like ignoring them.

Unfortunately a lot of the problems of Nintendo Classics service are mostly on the fact that no one talks about them as much because… “it’s good enough”. It’s the kind of stuff where the laymen would not notice what we’re talking about, and I just cannot be the only one who has to do that for them. Instead these are called nitpicks, and while I know when it’s a nitpick, I consider it is not a nitpick when it’s about respecting the original games. The major complaint I see is the border, which honestly I wonder if Nintendo is leaving it just to make it the obvious problem just for people not to be interested in the other (and imo more important) problems (input lag, stick sensitivity, poor N64 emulation, and so on).

But as much as I complain about them, fact of the matter is that it’s still good. You won’t necessarily have a bad time on N64, but you especially won’t have a bad time on the other systems. I don’t understand why I see some reactions of people saying GC is a failure even though it’s still such a farcry from N64 it’s amazingly good for what it is to me. Heck for many people it’s still a huge argument to have functioning pretty good emulation on a handheld (personally I admit I kinda don’t care but to each their own).

All that to say that I just think it still participates in grand scheme of preservation, even if it’s under the motivation and goals of a company. I just think awareness is particularly ignored, especially at a time where we’re drowning in games that only a few gets the most attention. There’s a lot to talk about this problem in general, but I don’t feel I am particularly fit to talk about it properly in a full post.

tl;dr