Collector pays over $20,000 to buy old Nintendo games before eShop closes

The Completionist lives up to his name ahead of eShop closure

Jirard Khalil, who goes by “The Completionist” on YouTube, spent nearly $23,000 on 3DS and Wii U games over the last year. He bought up 866 Wii U and 1,547 3DS titles overall to complete his collection.

The eShop on Wii U and 3DS will shut down on March 27, 2023, meaning that you won’t be able to purchase games for the two consoles there anymore. Fans have been searching for anything they might like to play or simply archive on the devices going forward, securing games before they are gone for good.

A few Pokémon games will become unavailable once the eShop on Wii U and 3DS stops being functional, which led to those games selling like warm bread over the last couple of weeks. For around 1,000 games of the roughly 2,500 offered on the eShop, the store’s closing will be the literal end – they can’t be purchased anywhere else.

Khalil’s shopping tour, of course, was a bit more extreme than anyone else’s. He didn’t just aim to secure his favorites, but anything that came into his view. That actually took quite some effort: The eShop wallet only holds up to $250, which meant that Khalil had to switch between buying games to drain the wallet and then redeeming eShop vouchers to fill his reserves again. He had to buy and redeem almost 500 vouchers for his shopping spree.

Any video games purchased on the eShop ahead of March 27 will be playable as normal on your device.

While digital game sales make up over 90% of purchases worldwide – a trend that keeps on growing from year to year –, events such as the eShop’s closure show one of the downsides of the digital-only business: It makes the historically important game conservation a lot harder by essentially deleting the easy access to thousands of games overnight. At least some private collectors like Khalil will preserve a large part of the Wii U and 3DS game library.