Topic: Will Virtual Console games I bought on my Wii U be transferred over to the Nintendo Switch?

So about a year or two ago I bought a (refurbished) Wii U so I could play Smash 4 with my pals. Unfortunately, it ended up not working anymore after a few months. With the Nintendo Switch coming out and all, I will not be buying a new Wii U, since all of my friends are going to be buying the new console and I want to play with them. However, I'm not sure if all of (or at least most) the games I bought on my Wii U will be playable on the Nintendo Switch. I spent a decent amount of money on a few games, and I even fully completed some of them, and it'd really suck to see that time and cash wasted. Most of the ones I bought were GBA/N64/SNES/Wii U games. Will I need to log into the account I already had for my Wii U on my Nintendo Switch? And will I be able to re-download the games I already bought at no extra cost? Or is all of that not possible?

Also, while we're at it...most of the Wii U games I bought were physical copies (Bayonetta 2, Mario Kart 8, Smash 4, ect). Will I be able to run those on the Nintendo Switch as well?

No one knows much about the Switch yet. Wait until the Switch presentation on January 12th to learn more about the system. There most likely won't be a way to play Wii U games since Switch doesn't seem to have GamePad support and it runs cartridges. There's no disc slot. As for Virtual Console. There most likely will be VC but it's not known if you can redownload games or upgrade them for a small fee. Everything is still up in the air until Nintendo reveals what the system does and doesn't do.

We don't know.

Virtual console games, in all likelihood, will reappear on the Switch, but we do not know which ones, how soon, or for how much. I'd say it's likely you won't have to buy the full selection full price (rather, only have to pay an upgrade fee for each title), but it's also possible that the games you bought won't be available for months or years after the Switch release.

Wii U games? As far as we know the Switch is not backwards compatible. A few Wii U games are looking to get Switch remasters but I very much doubt owning the original will get you any discount on those.

As for your Wii U - are you not entitled to free repair under warranty? (I'm not sure what Nintendo's policy is with refurbished systems! Also if it's been 2 years it may have expired.)

The rumours are saying you will have to pay a fee per game to transfer them. Sucks really...

And your Wii U purchases will in all probability count for nought. Keep playing them on your Wii U or buy the so-called 'enhanced ports'.

I am going with no as Nintendo has said the the Switch will not be included in the Wii U or 3DS ecosystem, it's an entirely different beast.

If I were you I would just get another Wii U if you are that worried about your VC games. If it happens that you can play Wii U games on the Switch well you can always sell the Wii U off later.

Yeah, anything they do will be almost surely limited to just VC releases. Purely because there's no reliable way of tracking your purchase for a disk short of having the disk physically in the console. Which the Switch can't do because it doesn't have an optical drive. And this isn't going to change anytime soon. Because of the used game market consumers have voted with their wallets against gaming companies being able to track physical game purchases. And that's if they port those games over which for a lot of releases they're not going to do.

But with the VC it's an entirely different story. Those games can only exist on the Wii U and 3DS as digital purchases. Excluding Wii/DS BC. Nintendo have also shown that they're more than happy to make these games available on new platforms. Even before the VC there were ports of NES and SNES games on Nintendo's consoles, especially their portables. So they can track your VC purchases and they're likely to release them again. Nothing stopping them from making those games available to you or at least giving you a heavy discount.

Well logic dictates that you could be able to play them on the new system for a fee like they did for the transition Wii to WiiU (which was an abomination because people had to pay for games they already had paid for and that had already installed on their system just for the priviledge to use the GamePad buttons). But with Nintendo, being Nintendo, and being on the neverending quest to see how many times can an honest man buy a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3, you never know. The Jan. presentation will probably shed some light on it.

The best course of action for Nintendo will be to ignore the VC completely. Not have it at all. It seems they will develop new NES SNES versions with online experiences so they might offer them independently and later give them for subscribers but the rest is not worth it. Yes it's a wonderful service on Wii but they put so much effort to transfer to the Wii U and have it work backwards compatible and then new versions, and system didn't sell or benefit from it. So logic dictates they just focus on the new games and other stuff. You got to pick and choose and focus on what's important to sell the system , to have a chance.

I keep both my Wii and Wii U hooked up to the TV and I can play all the VC, GC, Wii and Wii U. Also has the mini NES. Switch will sit next to those I'll be happy with that.