What do you think about shutdown of the e-shops?

I guess every thing has a lifetime. The risk of going all digital. Maybe they should do as Xbox and PlayStation. backwards compatibility on the switch from the e shop 

Time moves on. Doesn't matter too much, does it? There was plenty of time to buy and play those games.

It's one of the worries I have, that so much of our digital history is ephemeral and we'll forget and misremember our past.

Personally, Im not a fan of the choice.

I saw an article that poi ts out around 1000 games or something from over the generations will be unobtainable. Thing is Nintendo are ganatical about antipiracy measures. Which I can understand, but if you're literally going to bin off that many games and make no profit from them anyway, you may as well make them open source.

Same with Playstation and most of their back catalogue. Dont want to keep backwards compatibility because of licensing and such, yet cry about people emulating. I view it as if you cba to maintain your legacy, let enthusiasts do it.

Well, every e-shop has its lifetime, and the same happened to previous Nintendo e-shops. The good thing is that most of the games that were available in the Wii U and 3DS e-shops are also available in physical format. While it sucks that there's no digital format convenience anymore, most of those games can still be found and played if you own or buy a secondhand disc or cartridge from somewhere.

While it's unfortunate that the e-shop has been shut down, I don't understand why the YouTuber felt the need to purchase all of the games to preserve them. While preserving gaming history is important, it's likely that 90% or more of those games are available in a physical format, so he may not have had to spend so much money buying every single game from the e-shop.

Making them open source is not so easy, frankly. Nintendo, like Sony and Microsoft, can only make decisions about their own software and hardware. Since games are mostly made by third-party developers who hold the copyright of those games, Nintendo cannot force them to update their software or make it open source.

And that's why situations like this happen. Every single developer of those 1000 games should provide updates to keep the games compatible. Since Nintendo can't do it themselves due to copyright and the original developers don't want to support the game anymore, from a cost-effective perspective, Nintendo has to pull the plug at one point.

Unfortunately we all know that this will happen with all digital store places and it just reinforces the argument that you never actually own anything digital you purchase online. Either the rights are removed from the store which has happened with things like films and tv shows that people have bought so you can't access them anymore (in theory you should get your money back but that would never happen) or the store closes and you lose access to your entire content library. Either way people should have learned to not spend lots of money buying a vast content library that they will never get to keep!