Topic: Turns out you have to buy all your DSiWare games again if you trade-in for a DSi XL.

though you don't have to officially sign up for an account, they do have Club Nintendo... i could see them doing something with that, since it tracks everything you buy/register once your accounts are linked.

also, people already 'share' their downloads with others using their official PSN account information and stuff, which is what i'd imagine Nintendo is attempting to avoid.

And if the console breaks down?

Backwards compatibility is always a wise business move in this industry.

Yeah but the fact that you don't HAVE to have a Club Nintendo account is what worries me. If they did tie it to that, many would be left out. Who knows, let Nintendo worry about it. I just prefer Sony's and Microsoft's way of being able to transfer your games and account info all at once.

A fair point. But that's not what people have been kvetching about. Of course, there is the solution to send it to Ninty to transfer to your new console. Not ideal at all, but still there.

Agreed. It is smarter, especially for maintaining an installed customer base (which was the whole reason the GBA slot was originally included with the DS).

@corbs: yeah, Sony and Microsoft made it a heck of a lot easier, lol. it's a shame Nintendo's so far behind on this one.

Well I guess we can hope they come up with a solution. I've got a sh*tload of WW, DSiWare, and VC games.

Yeah, they do need to fix this. Even assuming backwards compatibility that still means there needs to be a way to transfer content. From what I can tell the software is tied to some kind of identifier on the system itself for determining whether or not you can redownload stuff.

Of course the requirement to create some kind of account could make importing more challenging in the future, but I'd rather have the ability to transfer software in the event my ha-do breaks. On the flipside, the system that's most likely to fail is my DSi LL and whilst I have purchased a lot of software, it's cheaper on average than WiiWare so I wouldn't be that put out at having to re-purchase it if push came to shove...

I imagine this is going to become a much bigger concern once the Wii's successor is announced. As it is, DSiWare has only been in existence for about a year and a half in Japan and almost exactly a year for the rest of the world. The average amount of downloads from DSiWare has to be relatively low on the whole given the length of time and the number of titles.

WiiWare and the Virtual Console, however, have been out for years and have hundreds of games available between them. The amount of games people have amounted in that time has to be fairly substantial on average. It's going to be a much larger shock if Nintendo tells people they're going to have to lose all of this.

I also think it's possible Nintendo will have something in the works for the 3DS. While Nintendo denies it, it's largely assumed the DSi XL was designed to market to a completely different group of people (ie the older crowd). Essentially, they're hoping people that didn't previously own a handheld are drawn to the larger screens, so it's not as pressing for Nintendo to do anything as far as transferring DSiWare titles as they're hoping the bulk of the DSi XL buyers didn't previously own a DSi. With the 3DS, that's obviously going to be a much different case, and by that time, people will have amassed a much larger collection.

Hopefully this is something Nintendo realizes and is working on, especially considering Apple's app store is increasingly becoming their biggest competitor in the handheld market.

Not to mention the fact that if you had a Mynintendo account, it's a hassle to get all your data to Club Nintendo.

I think what they did was fair. If they did it any other way there would have been much more pirating. In the future they might find a way to transfer the games. Whats done is done.

I don't mind.

I'm only interested in whether or not my current DSiware games will transfer to the 3DS

I have 88 dsiware games on my dsi, and i recently got a new XL. I looked at the pros: ll the useless crap or games I hated that I had on my dsi is gone. I only liked less than 20 of the games on it. :/

LOVING my XL btw.

@briunj04, That's actually an excellent idea, now that I understand (or think I understand) what you mean. A coded cartridge or SD card which is the only thing you can play the games on (the games you downloaded to one would be unplayable on any other coded cart or special coded SD card).

My other idea is transferring the games. You would go online with the DSi unit that has the games you bought, deactivate the the games' usage on that particular DSi, and transfer their usability to the new unit either by entering a serial number or other code on your new DSi or DSi XL. It's not perfect (especially if your DSi or DSi XL gets stolen), but it's better than what Nintendo has now. And to prevent a flood or something, you could only do this once a year.

I don't want Nintendo thinking they can just increase their income by making their loyal customers pay for the games all over again. I am thoroughly against greedy business tactics such as those.

I'm thinking one possible solution would be a firmware updated timed with the release. This would work better for the DSi/3DS than the Wii because of the independent displays. Clearly the shop channel identifies each system uniquely by some kind of identifier in firmware and the system itself checks a game to see if it's authorised to play it (hence your SD card won't work with your friend's systems and the system will even refuse to copy a game save file to system memory in most instances without having first loaded the game, even if you own it - after a system format, for example).

I see no reason why a firmware update or Shop Channel update couldn't have a "Transfer Shop Account" function that would enable one system to link up to the other to transfer game ownership. In the case of the DSi/3DS you would have both systems online and probably use something akin to the Download Play app over Wi-Fi. For the Wii you might use bluetooth to allow the Wii 2 (or whatever) to browse your Wii using the bluetooth device browsing functionality.

Effectively you'd be deauthorising one system for another, so it's less likely that friends would be doing this to give each other games since you'd lose the ability to download your games again. I could see any mechanism like this requiring you to redownload games to the new system rather than run them off the existing SD card as a further measure to thwart hacking, i.e., your transfer of authorisation wouldn't be like swapping the "watermark" or whatever method is used by the Wii/DS to indicate it is authorised to boot the game in question; furthermore each shop account would be unique, meaning if you swapped it back you'd still need to redownload to SD because your old DS/Wii would be given a new shop account every time the authorisation was transferred.

This update would not only allow transfer of online data to the new systems, but also to other Wiis/DSis in the event you needed to replace one. It would also have the benefit of being "importer friendly" since it would be a feature of the software and not require shipping the system off or doing an in-store swap - I seriously cannot see Nintendo doing anything requiring them to actually get hands-on with the software.

Obviously it all depends on how seriously Nintendo regards downloadable software and allowing customers to migrate between platforms. I expect that if they do regard downloads as a key part of their future plans then something like this will be coming down the pipe - I cannot see them potentially putting in a blocker to people upgrading or expecting people will be collecting handhelds and consoles just to play future games.

Am I missing something here? Can't you just put them onto an SD card, put said card into your XL, and copy it over? I guess not...

Nope