Imagine if Nintendo had tracked your digital purchases since the 2000s

I remember as a kid wondering why I didn't get access to the games I registered owning on Club Nintendo.

Turns out Nintendo never built a centralized system to track purchases, it was all just a bunch of disconnected systems, and anytime a new system came out they started over. They saw Wii VC games and Wii U VC games as separate titles, and it would be laughable to get one for free when you owned the other one. "those are two different things!"

Also bad, when you did the transfer as well from Wii to your Wii U, it deletes the game on the Wii. That’s why I refused to do the system transfer on Switch 2, I didn’t need them deleting a random thing for no reason (which they did do for certain users and save files).

As an aside, I had hacked my Wii to save a complete copy of the NAND to the SD card, did the transfer, and then reinstalled the copy and it was like it never happened. Sadly, I lost the copy sometime in the following decade, and when I turned the Wii back on to do something online, Nintendo figured it out and wiped it remotely.