So I was thinking about how im keeping all my consoles and games now so I can just break them out years upon years later, and If I download games will they always be on my system? or will one day they just all be wiped, I'm pretty sure once its downloaded I technically own it and can keep it as long as its still on my hard drive right?

As far as I know, as long as your hard drive doesen't corrupt itself it's your's forever. Which console are you talking about?

I'm not sure what you are asking here...

@mariobro4 Mainly Wii U but just consoles in general

@LordLzGlad Sorry, Im asking if I could ever lose my downloaded games

It's a conspiracy man! You buy the games, then they take 'em away with their minds and force you to buy them again! It's dangerous to go alone, take this!

I think when the system dies or is formatted that's the games gone, nintendo ties games to the consoles making retrieving them pretty difficult.

What?

I would recommend making a backup copy of your games.

Games are tied to the HDD, and in a worse case scenario, the serial number/Club Nintendo account. Alot of the people giving grief to Nintendo's system usually don't go through the appropriate protocol to get their games back if anything happens to their console.
I myself have had to call Nintendo and give them all the information necessary to get my games back on my Wii once. They understand and can fix your problems if you ever have any with your Nintendo products. It's their job as a business.

Technically when you buy any software you're actually paying for a license to run it. Now I'm sure somewhere in the fine print there might be legalese that could be interpreted such that it would appear to allow a company to remove said software, but short of you having obtained it illegally I'm pretty sure consumer law in most countries would prevent a company from gaining access to your system to remove legitimately purchased software. I'm pretty sure Sony got in a lot of trouble over remotely accessing hardware owners devices some years ago for some "anti-piracy" reason and it didn't go well for them.

The games are not tied to the HDD, and backing them up is totally useless.

When you download a game, you are buying the license to download it. This license is attached to your eshop account, which is tied to your console. If your console dies, send it in to be repaired by Nintendo and you will retain all your licenses. At this point in time you cannot simply transfer your account from one system to another.

Looking at the Wii, many virtual console games were removed from the shop a few years after being made available. Once removed, they could not be purchased. But anyone that had purchased them when they were available still could play the game, and could still redownload the game from the shop if they needed to.

Basically, if you buy a game online, it is yours forever on that system. You may be able to transfer things to the next console, or maybe to another WiiU in the future, but we don't know that much yet.

Okay that's what I figured, but then why were people so skeptical to download games? If your system crashed then Nintendo will allow you to get it again, whereas if you lose/break your disc your pretty much screwed

@astroshamu: The only thing that has (so far) come close to Nintendo reaching into your system to delete a game was when they refunded users over one years ago — i forget which game it was, it was a VC title that apparently wouldn't get past the first level or couple of levels or whatever. The game's programmers had coded in something to block people attempting to pirate the game, and I guess Nintendo couldn't come up with a workaround for whatever reason... anyway, I remember Nintendo offered to refund users the points they'd spent on the messed up game, and upon accepting the refund the game would be deleted from your system. If you didn't accept the refund, though, you would be left with the non-working game. That's the only thing I can think of that's happened so far that would be like what you're describing; they don't even delete VC titles from your system that have been removed from the Wii Shop. Does this help?

Generally a variety of other reasons are why people prefer retail over download, like having a physical item, being able to trade it/sell it/lend it, etc.

As far as security of your purchase, I think downloading is perfect.

How does the account system work then? I figured that there's a licence file that takes up data(even if it's a small file size), and if you format the console, that data will be erased. Unless Nintendo has the files in their server, there has to be some sort of memory unit holding the data(HDD).
What if I format my day 1 Wii U vs. a Wii U that will have the updates already present this spring?

I believe the game you are referring to is The Last Ninja 3.

This is all going off of how the Wii works, since I do not know for the WiiU but it is likely all the same.

I do not know if the eshop licenses are saved to the system or through a server Nintendo has. But the only way to erase the licenses is to select to do so in the eshop menu. Formatting the system does not erase them. And it does not remove firmware updates, either.

There's some kind of link between your Wii U account and your eShop account. Your Wii U account is tied to your system, so if you delete that you're screwed because you can't just recreate it as a check will be made against whatever Nintendo server holds the equivalent and say that account already exists. Mind you this is all anecdotal.

The easy solution to the account transfer issue would be to have a device cap like Apple has where you can only have so many devices linked to your Apple ID and then you eventually need to de-authorise them to add newer ones. Of course if you forget to deauthorise a device before getting rid of it you'll have a problem, but it's an acceptable trade-off for convenience.

Ah okay forgot about that, I haven't sold my games practically ever, so that's not a big deal to me

@Sean_Aaron Ya I like the way the apple ID's work they should definitely do that

Only if the name of the game is 1984.