Is the "Nintendo Classics" collection a good value?

Nintendo Classics is a collection of hundreds of retro video games from Nintendo (and Sega) consoles from the NES to the GameCube. Nintendo Classics is included with the Nintendo Switch Online (NSO) subscription, which starts at $20/year (~$1.66/month) for individual users.

Looking at the prices of retro games these days, this seems like an incredible value for players that want to play these games. This post is sharing a dataset that I've curated about Nintendo Classics games and mapping their value to actual physical prices of the same games, with some interesting queries.

For example, here's a graph showing the total value (in $USD) of Nintendo Classics over time:

The dataset was generated from the tables provided on Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA). The dataset doesn't contain pricing information, instead only links to corresponding Pricecharting pages. This page only shares approximate aggregate price information, not prices of individual games. This page will be automatically updated over time as Nintendo announces more games are coming to Nintendo Classics. This page was last updated October 7th, 2025.

How many games and value per platform?§

There are 8 unique platforms on Nintendo Classics each with their own collection of games. The below table includes the value of both added and announced-but-not-added games. You can see that the total value of games in Nintendo Classics is many thousands of dollars if genuine physical copies were purchased instead. Here's a graph showing the total value of each platform changing over time:

And here's the data for all published and announced games as a table:

SELECT platform, COUNT(*), SUM(price), SUM(price)/COUNT(*)
FROM games
GROUP BY platform;

How much value is in each Nintendo Classics tier?§

There are multiple "tiers" of Nintendo Classics each with a different up-front price (for the console itself) and ongoing price for the Nintendo Switch Online (NSO) subscription.

Certain collections require specific hardware, such as Virtual Boy requiring either the recreation ($100) or cardboard ($30) Virtual Boy headset and GameCube collection requiring a Switch 2 ($450). All other collections work just fine with a Switch Lite ($100). All platforms beyond NES, SNES, Game Boy, and Game Boy Color require NSO + Expansion Pass.

* I wanted to highlight that Nintendo Switch Online (NSO) without Expansion Pack has the option to actually pay $3 monthly rather than $20 yearly. This doesn't make sense if you're paying for a whole year anyway, but if you want to just play a game in the NES, SNES, GB, or GBC collections you can pay $3 for a month of NSO and play games for very cheap.

How often are games added to Nintendo Classics?§

Nintendo Classics tends to add a few games per platform every year. Usually when a platform is first announced a whole slew of games are added during the announcement with a slow drip-feed of games coming later.

Here's the break-down per year how many games were added to each platform:

SELECT platform, STRFTIME('%Y', added_date) AS year, COUNT(*)
FROM games
GROUP BY platform, year
ORDER BY platform, year DESC;

What are the rarest or valuable games in Nintendo Classics?§

There are a bunch of valuable and rare games available in Nintendo Classics. Here are the top-50 most expensive games that are available in the collection:

SELECT platform, name, price FROM games
ORDER BY price DESC LIMIT 50;

Who publishes their games to Nintendo Classics?§

Nintendo Classics has more publishers than just Nintendo and Sega. Looking at which third-party publishers are publishing their games to Nintendo Classics can give you a hint at what future games might make their way to the collection:

SELECT publisher, COUNT(*) AS num_games, SUM(price)
FROM games WHERE publisher NOT IN ('Nintendo', 'Sega')
GROUP BY publisher
ORDER BY num_games DESC LIMIT 20;

What games have been removed from Nintendo Classics?§

There's only been one game that's been removed from Nintendo Classics so far. There likely will be more in the future:

SELECT platform, name, added_date, removed_date
FROM games WHERE removed_date IS NOT NULL;

This site uses the MIT licensed ChartJS for the line chart visualization.

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