Say goodbye to a “regular schedule” of emulated classics on Switch, Ars Technica

Now we play the waiting game –

Nintendo halts monthly Switch classics additions as it launches Super NES support.

Kyle Orland –Sep 6, 2019 5: 15 PM UTC

We'll no longer be seeing regular monthly additions to this selection of SNES classics playable on the Switch, nor their NES counterparts. — Enlarge/We’ll no longer be seeing regular monthly additions to this selection of SNES classics playable on the Switch, nor their NES counterparts.

Fans of classic Nintendo re-releases got some good news this week, as Nintendo finally releasedemulated versions of 20 Super NES gamesas part of its $ 20 – per-year Switch Online service. But the company tempered that announcement with some less visible bad news: further releases in that collection will no longer come on their usual monthly schedule.

Sincelaunching with 20 NES titleslast September, the Switch’s collection of playable classics has expanded by two or three games each month, to the point where itnow includes 46 distinct NES titles. But yesterday,a blog post on Nintendo’s Japanese site(machine translation) indicated that those releases would be coming “irregularly” from now on.

Ina statement to Business Insider, a Nintendo representative confirmed that ” More NES games will be added in the future, but those releases will not adhere to a regular schedule. “

By contrast, Nintendo kept up its pace of regular monthly releases for the (now defunct) Virtual Console emulatorson the WiiandWii Ufor years before those releases began to slow to a trickle. That situation was a bit different, as Virtual Console games could be purchased individually rather than rented en masse via subscription. Still, the few dozen emulated games available via Switch subscription currently pale in comparison to the hundreds available on the Virtual Console, making it an odd time for Nintendo to announce a slowdown.

That said, $ 20 a year is still a pretty good price for access to over 60 NES and SNES games in an easy-to-play portable-or-TV-based format (not to mentionthe online featuresyou get on top of that). We’ll have to see just how “irregularly” those further releases are before we can know just how much better that deal will get in the future. But if Nintendo lays down another surprise release of (Nintendo) games in the next few months, all is forgiven.