The most frustrating thing about NSO's classic game libraries is that they're actually a pretty good idea marred by pitiful execution.
Imagine if, on top of NES, SNES, and Nintendo 64 games, we also had Gameboy, Gameboy Colour, Gameboy Advanced, GameCube, DS, and 3DS games available to us in an aesthetically pleasing format at a reasonable price. Assuming Nintendo went the full mile to gather, at the very least, most of the important games in these libraries, they would genuinely have a service that could compete with emulators in the marketplace.
If they wanted to get absolutely crazy, they could then introduce a pricing tier that gives access to consoles like the Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast, Turbographx-16, Neo Geo, and Xbox. Imagine a world where headlines like "Resident Evil 1, Jet Set Radio, and Halo 2 are coming to Nintendo Switch Online" are written without a mark of sarcasm or parody.
But nope, instead, Nintendo seems to be comfortable just offering 4 consoles (all of which have more than a few key titles missing) for 50 mother****ing dollars annually with absolutely no bells or whistles beyond online play and rewind (which NESticle has had since before I was born, IIRC). I get licensing is expensive, but the old adage of "If you're not going to do something right, don't do it at all" seems to ring true here. Nintendo needs to fully commit to building a stronger online service, find some alternative method of releasing legacy content, or accept that they are unable to compete with pirates.
Microsoft really should've given Nintendo some advice on the importance of making sure your subscription service has value proportional to its annual price when they were licensing Banjo-Kazooie.
