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Ahead of the Wii U and 3DS eShops' closure, YouTube's most prolific completionist bought every game

Wait 'til you see how much it cost.

A 2DS, a 3DS, and a New 2DS all superimposed on front of key art from Donkey Kong, Pokemon, Mario Maker, Zelda, and Animal Crossing.
Image credit: Nintendo

The Wii U and Nintendo 3DS eShops are both shutting down at the end of this month, so YouTuber Jirard "The Completionist" Khalil's solution was to buy them all.

Last year, Nintendo made the unfortunate decision to shut down the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS eShops, and that date is almost upon us. From March 27, you won't be able to buy any games from either online storefront, though you will be able to download any that you have previously purchased. There's a whole heap of problems there, one of them being that up to 1000 digital-only games will just completely disappear when this happens. So of course, that left Khalil with one option: buy them all (thanks, VGC).

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To put this into perspective, that's 886 Wii U games, adding up to 1.2TB in storage size, and $9,673 (£7943) in cost , and 1547 3DS games, DSiWare, and DLC, making up 267GB in storage size, and $13,118 (£10,772) in cost. That's a grand total of $22,791, or £18,715, an absolutely heft sum of money.

It wasn't a simple process though, as the whole thing literally took 328 days to complete. The reason why it took so much time to complete is because Khalil was worried that spending such huge amounts all at once on the two storefronts would upset his bank, so used 464 eShop cards to complete the monumental task at hand. In turn, he had to redeem each card one by one, except the eShop wallet could only hold $250 at once, meaning he had the need to buy games, redeem cards, buy more games, redeem more cards, until he was finally done.

One person, or in this case a team of people really, isn't going to solve the preservation process for all these games, which is part of what makes Nintendo's decision so problematic. A majority of these games will require the two-screen setup, meaning they won't be easy to port to other platforms. As Khalil himself notes a number of times, "This is why it's stupid!"

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