Nintendo should offer unlimited retro downloads for a subscription fee

I don’t have access to Nintendo’s digital sales, of course, but I can’t imagine Virtual Console games make up a huge portion of revenue. (If they did, you’d think Nintendo would make a less superficial effort with the internet in general.) But, given that the company has proven itself to be open to new business ideas with its DeNA mobile gaming partnership, I think there’s another way that the company should take a second step into the 2010s: adopt the Netflix model, and offer unlimited retro downloads for a subscription fee.

Here are some movies you can watch right now on Netflix without causing the value of film as a medium to implode: Raging Bull. Fargo. Manhattan. Pulp Fiction. Chinatown. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Amélie. Trainspotting. Apocalypse Now. Rocky. These are movies that a lot of people probably pay several dollars each for on iTunes (or, well, DVD) à la carte, yet their availability on Netflix doesn't hurt their classic status. Nintendo has by far the most valuable back catalog and intellectual property in gaming; even if it only made its own titles available and ignored third parties completely, it’d have a vast library that a lot of people would be willing to pay monthly for.

Sure, some will pay the cost of a month of Netflix for Super Mario 64 this month. But what about next month? I can’t imagine Donkey Kong 64 or Paper Mario drawing similar revenue, but they’re exactly the kind of title people would dip into out of curiosity under a subscription model. In a world where EA is offering access to all but its newest current console games for just $30 a year, this doesn’t seem like the hardest of calls.

Nintendo has an unbeatable yet under-utilized library. Putting old games on phones isn’t the answer; putting them in the hands of more Nintendo fans is.