I pay for Nintendo Switch Online, which includes access to a handful of games from the NES and SNES consoles. If I want to pay more I could also get access to games for N64 and SEGA Genesis (SEGA Mega Drive outside of North America if I'm not mistaken).
I would have to assume (may not be correct) that Nintendo Switch Online will roll over to their new console(s), albeit under some other name, including the emulation software and game access.
You mean in that you can not play the Virtual Console on Wii anymore. (It does help to point out that they can choose to end the service whenever they want.)
It is still a point that the games which were made available on the Virtual Console could still simply be made available on Nintendo Switch Online. It seems to me that the Virtual Console for the Wii (in effect) became the emulators that were made available with Nintendo Switch Online.
That's the standard every other platform has moved to. If I buy a game on the play store I can use it on any android I own. If I buy Banjo Kazooie on the Microsoft store I can play it on my 360 or Xbox one or series x and probably the next five consoles Microsoft puts out. Nintendo's rabid anti-consunerism will bite them one day.
Historically, porting console games from one to the next isn't always the easiest task since the hardware is so specialized. I think it's been fairly easy for Microsoft because they basically just put out a standard PC every console generation, and their controller design has been pretty much exactly the same since the beginning. But Sony and Nintendo have had some weird hardware. The PS3 was infamously difficult to develop for because it had some wacky architecture under the hood, and we've only recently seen somewhat capable emulation efforts for it.
And Nintendo's in a particularly weird situation where even if it wasn't just the underlying architecture, the consoles all have some kind of "gimmick" where you couldn't really play them on a different system without rethinking the entire game. Like, if you bought a Wii U game digitally, the game was designed around being played on a TV with a secondary resistive touchscreen controller. How would you play that on the Switch, where you only have one screen which may be either on the TV or handheld, and it's capacitive instead of resistive? Nintendo has ported some Wii U games to Switch, but they involved manual work to change how some stuff works. Same with when they port Wii games to it. Super Mario Galaxy was made for a Wii remote and nunchuck, and had a lot of motion control gameplay elements that had to be redesigned to work on Switch.
Historically, porting console games from one to the next isn't always the easiest task since the hardware is so specialized
Yeah, it's tough when the consoles have roughly comparable performance. When they don't it's less so. Amateurs without access to source code got the Dreamcast to run Playstation games better than the Playstation. They got the PSP the run N64 games. They've gotten the Switch to run everything from the Dreamcast down. It's less work than that for internal developers; Nintendo basically made an N64 emulator for the Gamecube as a lark just to offer a free pre-order disc with Wind Waker.
Yea I was also sort of pointing to the fact I can't play any of those games I had to purchase on Wii virtual console unless Nintendo decides to release them via Nintendo Switch Online - of which I also pay for.
I would have to assume (may not be correct) that Nintendo Switch Online will roll over to their new console(s), albeit under some other name, including the emulation software and game access.