YouTuber Spends Nearly $23,000 to Buy Every Nintendo Wii U and 3DS Game on eShop [VIDEO]

In a recently published video, video game YouTuber Jirard “The Completionist” Khalil documented how he and his team purchased every single Nintendo Wii U and 3DS game available for the consoles on the Nintendo eShop with the goal of preserving them for posterity before the respective e-stores for both consoles shut down later this month.

In February 2022, Nintendo announced that it would be shutting down the 3DS and Wii U eShops this year. Come March 27, Wii U and 3DS owners will no longer be able to make any purchases for their consoles from the Nintendo eShop.

Before that happens and some lesser-known titles and DLC are inevitably lost to the sands of time, Khalil wanted to download and preserve everything he could. What better way to do so than to buy out the entire Wii U and 3DS eShops?

In total, Khalil was able to purchase 866 Wii U games and 1,547 3DS games, including DSiWare, Virtual Console games, and DLC. All of this translated to 1.2 TB of data for the Nintendo Wii U, and 267 GB (or 2,136,689 blocks, which is what the console calculates game data size as) for the 3DS.

More importantly, however, this altruistic mission cost a whopping $22,791 USD, spread out across 464 Nintendo eShop gift cards. The project took 328 days, and while Khalil was ultimately successful, the endeavour was wrought with roadblock after roadblock.

While the speed bumps started with their bank locking Khalil and Co out of using their credit card after they’d already bought $18,000 worth of eShop gift cards, their hurdles quickly started coming directly from Nintendo itself.

Not only do the Wii U and 3DS only allow users to hold a maximum balance of $250 in their eShop wallet at any given time, but Nintendo also limits how much money users can load into their balance in a 24-hour window.

The YouTuber also uncovered some bizarre limitations on the consoles themselves, like odd storage restrictions and the fact that on the 3DS, you have to actually play a game to buy DLC for it. What’s more, many titles hide their DLC altogether until the player completes a certain percentage of the game.

You can watch Khalil and his team go through the painstaking process of buying every single Wii U and 3DS game available on the eShop in the video below:

While Nintendo’s eShop policies and wallet balance restrictions can help prevent excessive accidental purchases and potentially stop overzealous kids from spending too much of their parents’ money, their rigidity and complete lack of recourse can hinder passionate enthusiasts like Khalil. Let us know what you think in the comments below.