Nintendo Switch Online Announces Removal Of Super Famicom Title – Nintendo Life
GuestGuestLogin | Sign UpNintendo LifeGuestLogin or Sign UpGoodbye, Super SoccerUpdate [Sat 1st Mar 2025, 2:30am]: Nintendo has confirmed Super Soccer will also be removed from the Switch Online SNES service later this month.Super Soccer will “no longer be available”Original Story: So normally we’re used to reporting about the latest retro additions to the Switch Online library, but today is a bit different…Nintendo’s customer service account in Japan has announced it’s actually removing – yes, removing – a digital game from its classic Super Famicom service. It’s the Spike Chunsoft game Super Formation Soccer (aka the Super Nintendo title Super Soccer).Here’s the official notice via Nintendo’s social channel and website, which mentions how the distribution of this game will end next month on 28th March 2025. No other details have been provided.Nintendo: “The title “Super Formation Soccer” (Spike Chunsoft) included in “Super Famicom Nintendo Switch Online” will end distribution at 10:00 AM on Friday, March 28, 2025. After distribution ends, even those who have already downloaded “Super Famicom Nintendo Switch Online” will no longer be able to use it.”As you can see, this game originally debuted for the Switch Online Super Famicom service in September 2019, and was one of the few third-party additions at the time. For now, it seems this news has only been announced in Japan, so if we hear any local updates about the removal of the Super Nintendo release, we’ll be sure to let you know.Every retro game available with an NSO sub (plus the Expansion Pack)Not a fan of Switch Online, huh?The perfect Valentine’s Day giftWhat are your thoughts about this? Let us know in the comments.About Liam DoolanLiam is a news writer and reviewer for Nintendo Life and Pure Xbox. He’s been writing about games for more than 15 years and is a lifelong fan of Mario and Master Chief.Comments 122interesting, there was no reason given? maybe something to do with copyright?! hmm 😹Hopefully this doesn’t become a trend. Once NSO one day does shut down, I’m worried I won’t have my progress for it anymore, and this isn’t reassuring.Why do I suddenly want to play it?As soon as I read the headline I knew it wouldn’t be a Nintendo owned game.Hmm. I wonder if the deal to have it on NSO was up for renewal and Spike Chunsoft upped the price?I wonder how many other NSO games are only there under a limited time license deal. This could be a bad sign for the future.Well… this is certainly a worrying new precedent.Thankfully I would think all the first-party games are safe, but there are a LOT of third-party classics on there at the moment.Can you imagine being 30 hours deep in Breath of Fire II and then suddenly Capcom wants to release their own collection and orders Nintendo to remove it from NSO? It sounds bad, but it is absolutely not an impossible scenario by any means….This is literally the reason why I bought the SNK collection to play Crystalis rather than use the NSO app btw. I have never felt fully comfortable with the way the app works, and here is literally exactly my problem manifesting.@PikminMarioKirby I cannot recommend retro emulation enough.This is why we can’t have nice things… 😭I was afraid something like this would happen. I mean, this isn’t a game I play but it would suck if something I like gets removed. Like Earthworm Jim 2.We will all mourn the loss of the fan favorite game whose removal will cause the depression of manyThis is why I miss Virtual Console, man. And being able to buy game collections for retro Nintendo stuff. I like owning games rather than just renting them. And yeah, yeah, I know digital “ownership” isn’t the most secure thing in the world, but I still have access to all my Virtual Console purchases so… feels more permanent than NSOoh no*retroarch*ooooooo!!! this serious*Delta*ly sucks, Stuff like this is doom*snes9x*ing the retro market scene, and they seriously need to *raspberrypi*cut it out or else things’ll be hopeless! cougcoughcoigfh9fu sorry guys do i have a sore throat or what lolWhy don’t they offer people a chance to buy it before removing it?@Waluigi451 The Virtual Console wasn’t immune to delistings, either. SimCity SNES was delisted on the Wii, as was the DKC trilogy and all of the C64 games. Tetris GB was delisted on 3DS, Wii U lost a few TurboGrafx games, et cetera.@Waluigi451 Lucky you. I had purchased a good bit of retro on original Wii.Landlord stole my belongings including the Wii around 2017.Lost interest for a few years after. When got my Switch in 2022, seemingly no way to access old account / ‘Virtual Console’ service discontinued.This is why Nintendo needs to give us the option to buy these games.@EarthboundBenjyDang, you just reminded me of my Crystalis playthrough on the NSO that I put a good 25 hours into before I got stuck and abandoned it. I should try and go back to it. So far the only game I’ve played to completion on the NSO has been Mario Picross.On one hand I don’t care enough about the game to care about it going away. On the other, I’m not happy about games being able to vanish randomly at whim, but I guess it’s to be expected in the digital world…Unsubscribe.Kind of a death knell for the service in my eyes.*Like, yeah, I don’t care about this game, but the problem with these subscription services is games get taken away, then added later as if it’s a new value proposition. A constantly building library? I’m happy paying monthly for that.*I will continue to pay my $10/yr for the service, so take my grumblings with a grain of salt. Gotta have my online multiplayer.If the future of gaming is digital, then gaming has no future. 🔌🎮Eh I’m okay with this@N00BiSH yeah, but if you bought them, you could still download them/play them. Still can.Played Super Soccer a lot as a kid. And even now it’s still a decent game.”Oh no! Anyway. . .”look, i know this is not the greatest news, but. . .Nintendo knows the would get butchered alive if they did this to an actually good game, ESPECIALLY one of their own. I’m not worried about the future.I can still play all of my games from the Wii and Wii U virtual console.Anddddd here comes the over reactions.@batmanbud2 True they would never delist or make any of their good games unplayable. Like Mario 3D All Stars, Pacman 99, Mario 35. They would never allow those games to be delisted or shutdown. I’m not worried about the future either.@Ultimapunch look, I don’t know what they were thinking in 2020, but it hasn’t happened since, so i’m not worried.also, Pacman 99 was very much Bamco, not Nintendo.@Ultimapunch I never used virtual console on my wii. That’s a pretty sweet deal, but what happens if your wii breaks? Can you login on another one and you’re good to go?@Wisestfool oh you can beat crystalis, I believe in you!! And you get to ride around on a dolphinLong live physicalSeriously though, subscription services are a massive rip off. Obviously I still have some, but I’m not happy about it and consider them a scamI’m ok with this, licensing issues come up and things get removed. If Breathe of Fire 2 gets taken off and I’m 3/4th of the way through it is kinda on me, that I haven’t finished the game in the 7 years I’ve been renting it.Almost certainly it’s a licensing issue. I need to get into BoF fast I guess. Been putting it off, but guess the clock is ticking.I feel like there is some over reaction going on here, lol.While I don’t care much about that license soccer game, I would be more appreciated if Nintendo had an option for us to buy these NSO games just like how they give us an option to buy those darn Expansion Packs (such as Splatoon 3 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe) on NSO. Those Expansion Packs for some games could be rent as long as you are subscribed to NSO but if you like em you could buy em, why not apply this same practice to the NSO games too Nintendo? It’s more money to both you and the dev’s pocket anyways.@Krambo42 Sure, but not everyone’s willing and able to dig out their old systems to play Virtual Console. That’s kind of why stuff like NSO exists to begin with.@Corvus96 If it breaks, it breaks.I think calling Nintendo and offering some sort of evidence allows them to transfer purchases to a new account.But honestly, I’ve used my Wii since 2009, and the only thing that’s broken is the disc drive and the clock battery. The fan finally broke last year and got it replaced within a week, this console is incredible!Let’s be real, the service was never meant to be good. It was always just an excuse to charge for online that’d previously been free, without improving anything.@N00BiSH sure, I’m just saying, there’s a pretty big difference between delisting a game and removing a game from a subscription service.@Krambo42 There really isn’t? It’s still removing content from a service for an unknown/possibly permanent period of time either way.@N00BiSH but if you bought a game before they removed it from the shop, you can still play it. That’s a big difference!@N00BiSH yes. But take that up with Spike Chunsoft, not Nintendo.I feel like this might cause some subscription cancelations.Not specifically for this game being removed, but because it’s the first removal, showing that it is indeed a possibility and people not wanting to be a part of that.This is why people generally prefer virtual console, obviously.Time to bring back VC.Not the kind of Thursday night “surprise/delight” I was expecting this evening. ☹️Still, this eventuality was unavoidable, I guess. It’s the unfortunate nature of subscription services, right? Easy come, easy go! Maybe it’s best to prioritize playing those 3rd-party NSO games in which you’re interested. 😓Bring back the VC!!! 🔥So not only are we not getting any Pokemon game and have only gotten 1 game this month….they are taking one away as well?!! 🥹🤣I bet it still works when you emulate it.Clearly preparing for Switch 2 so they can continue drip feeding the same dozen or so games all over again as they like to do.I have a lot of nostalgia for Super Soccer, it was one of my first snes games but of the 150m Switches sold how many are often – if ever, booting up Super Soccer?We’ll all survive.An unfortunately reality of subscription based services. I like them because of the opportunity to try games you typically wouldn’t buy, but the lack of a purchasing option is annoying. At the same time, each requires its own negotiations and contracts between Nintendo and 3rd parties.That’s a shame, because Super Soccer is a fairly big part of the SNES story. It was a launch title in my country and Nintendo advertised it as if it was their own.A SNES library without Super Soccer, is like when Mario loses his cap in SM64. Nothing is broken, but it just feels wrong.This is why Virtual Console is missed.
You bought a game, you kept the game.Hope this increase awareness, Nintendo has full control over these games and you can’t do nothing about it. Keep paying for a volatile service and enjoy it while it exists.So, basically this is what Netflix and countless other streaming services are doing, including Sony PlayStation and now people are complaining? This was a bit to be expected. I am personally not keen on this either, but I’m not shocked or anything that this is happening at all.There are more glaring omissions from the NSO library that are being sold as collections which I think is more of a shame than anything. I would rather see them all under one app than several. Especially because not all collections of classic games are as good as the other.i remember playing that with my brother when we were kids and fight over the fact that you could score simply by kicking the ball in a straight line to the goal from anywhere on the pitch.those good old days.And so it begins..@Dee123 i guess negotiations for bring it to the switch 2Just have to have a mindset about these subscription services like Netflix – movie gets added, you watch, some time later its removedAs long as gaming as a whole doesnt move to a subscription service then its fine@FishyS Goldeneye is a prime example that won’t stay foreverhttps://www.nintendo.com/kr/hardware/switch/onlineservice/fc/Same announcement’s come out of South Korea. South Korea gets the international set of these game collections (as opposed to the separate Japanese set, seen nowhere else but Hong Kong). Based on this, something tells me western announcements are going to be whens, not ifs.If I’ve calculated right, the target time of the delisting’ll be noon same date in Sydney, 2 PM same date in Auckland, 1 AM same date in London, 9 PM previous date in New York City, 6 PM previous date in Los Angeles, and 3 PM previous date in Honolulu (note: DST will have begun in most of North America but not any of Europe, and will still be ongoing in Australia and New Zealand, on those dates; Honolulu does not observe DST).It’s probably going to be released as part of a compilation laterSuper Soccer was published by Nintendo outside of Japan. I wonder if spike chunsoft wanted to renegotiate for the game for some reason.And this is why I will always buy any game I can physical. You can never trust digital, let alone streaming… if I cant get it physically I wont buy it.Games are coming off NSO faster than games being added!!!@Waluigi451 I wonder why they don’t offer both. Like why not offer people the ability to buy the game if they want to?I think it’s because Spike Chunsoft told Nintendo to remove it for legal reasons.@zockermillerAren’t like…80% of games digital-only?NL users (that’s you and me!) rank Super Soccer the #58 best SNES game on the NSO (out of 70).That puts it in the bottom 20% of choices available.Got the entire set of NES, SNES, N64 etc safe on my Rog Ally, and backed up on harddrives. It’s the only way to truly preserve these games, including all the games that will never be re-released, due to those damn licenses.@MontyCircus of course not. This is sadly a misconception which many believe. With the Switch we have around 85% physical, playable 100% off the cart with no internet required. www.doesitplay.org is a great place to check this.Is there a Taiwan team in the game? I know the NEO GEO Super Sidekick games were delisted for this reason, which is very dumb.Most likely it’s because of a license specific to this game so hopefully almost if not all other games on NSO should be safe – that said, while I’ll keep on supporting the official releases including NSO (even more so considering how cheap it is, especially by sharing a subscription with friends) and I encourage all those able to do so to that first and foremost it’s undeniable that emulation and/or modding and yes, including piracy in this case, keeps on being the king of preservation and accessibility of discontinued non-live-service games!Welcome to DRM Club.Hate this not owning anything lark.All these companies just want their iOS App Store-style walled gardens where nothing is truly owned and can be taken away. When licensing or maintenance cost is slightly above an acceptable level defined in a spreadsheet then pop goes the weasel.Has permeated from movies to music to e-books to games and is now scarily enough trickling into car ownership. All for the sake of “convenience “.Abandoning custom for any companies who don’t believe in ownership is really all one can do.And this is why buying and owning is better. Yes, the streaming service is cheaper with all the games available, but if you only want to play online or only have a couple older games you’d choose to make time for then its not cheaper anymore. Better to pick and choose the few games that you know you will go back to long after Nintendo or anyone else decides its not to be played anymore@Kiyata It does have a future: Emulation.Retro emulation is the only way (Without paying often-exorbitant prices on the second-hand market) to play many old games, and it will only become more important as stunts like this pile up…I’ve been preaching to the choir for years how we need to have the ability to purchase individual games off the service to play indefinitely. It’s more money for Nintendo and the consumer can play all the games they want without limits. It’s a win for both sides.@zockermillerI check DekuDeals, and at least here in Canada, nearly all games are only available digitally. Here are the last bunch I’ve been interested in:That’s a whole month of games. None available at retail in Canada. Maybe somewhere, in some far-flung country they’re available, but they’re all the same to me as all-digital.@MontyCircus Hm well these are all smaller games I assume as I never heard of them, so that would be why they are only digital. Indies are mostly digital. but even so, I wouldnt buy them as you dont own digital at all and my hope is always that someone like LRG picks these up. Then I will buy it.This is why I love physical media and hate subscription services. I’d rather have less but knowing it can’t be taken away@Ultimapunch”True they would never delist or make any of their good games unplayable.”I don’t let corporate entities decide what games I can play, let alone which ones are “good.” ✌️@EarthboundBenjy I would be ecstatic if Capcom did that. Not only could you own Breath of Fire II for the long term, but hopefully a collection would come with I-IV. I can’t imagine III or IV would ever show up on NSO either.Buy physical media people.Yes I know, quite frequently, video games need patches and DLC are missing from the cartridge.But still, if they choose to delete these games, they will delete everything, including your access to the base game (which is garanted when you do have a cartridge)@zockermiller Where are you getting that 85% physical figure from? Even a quick glance at the new releases shows that digital-only games outnumber physical releases massively, and it only appears to be heading more towards digital. If anything 85% digital-only is more likely than the other way round.@BringleWorkshopYeah, I agree, it would be great to be able to play a proper modern collection rather than having to rely on a now-proven-to-be-unreliable service like NSO.Capcom has released MM Battle Network collections to decent success, so hopefully they’ll think about their other RPG classics.@EarthboundBenjy This is why I’m glad I bought it on WIIU VC all those years ago!How does it work for 3rd partys and payment? Does anyone know? Does Nintendo pay them a repeat yearly fixed fee or something? Or could it get lowered if they know not that many are playing it? Just curious how it might work really. There must be some games getting a lot more play than others on NSO.Well licensed games are always a mess.@GameOtaku Unfortunately Nintendo is stubborn and doesn’t listen to what customers want. If they did, we would have the option to buy retro games off NSO, Mother 3 would be released in the west and Gen 1-3 Pokemon games would be available to buy on the Switch by now.My suspicion of what happened here is that the licensing agreement came up, and there was a dispute over the price, and Nintendo looked at the usage of super soccer and saw that it was probably close to non-existent and therefore not worth the price of licensing. It’s going to happen, I’m not going to get worked up over a single game that I never play, but if this starts becoming a trend then I’ll get concerned. But it’s not trend yet, so really why get up in arms?As far as virtual console, yes you could “own” the games, but those e shops are gone. If you have a Wii or Wii U and it breaks today, you have no way of getting those games back. So at the moment every single virtual console game is delisted. It’s slightly more permanent than nso, but not really. Physical is the only surefire way of keeping something somewhat permanently, and that is dying a slow death in the industry unfortunately.@mikejs78 Actually not true on you won’t get your downloads back if the Wii/ Wii U breaks. You can still transfer your account to another console and redownload your purchases but can’t buy games that were on the closed eshop anymore.@OctolingKing13 I’m guessing there’s licensing. The boxart has a photo of an actual player.Nooooooo!!!!! Please no!!!!!!Here we go. The very thing people were worried about regarding NSO. For now it looks like an isolated case, but we’ll just have to see where it goes in the future… And where the inevitable fate of NSO goes.@N00BiSH delisted yes, but people who purchased it still had access to that game. You can still redownload those games if you purchased them before they were delisted. That’s different from NSO removing a game for everyone on Switch.And this is why I go Physical, what happened to all the DSi games and WiiWare? ALL GONE!@-wc- Careful. The dark arts of which you hint towards can catch you bans around these parts.@Bunkerneath True. But at least I can still play the ones I bought and downloaded. Subscription services can remove things at any second.Um… This might have more to do with spike chunsofts parent company then nintendo. I say this because after some light research. It turns out that Sony became kadakawas largest share holder as of last January. So it most likely is a licensing thing.Licenses to games should last way way longer, change my mind.@OctolingKing13 Not copyright. It’s a license to provide it for a short or long period of time.An oddity by NSO standards indeed; finite availability is more characteristic of PS+ Catalogue and GamePass but those spell it out in advance. Makes you wonder if Spike Chunsoft has found themselves in the mood for a retail retro batch release of their own, like a fair few publishers before it.@UltimapunchThere’s more than one way to play a game legitimately!(PS – do people really get banned for talking about emulating games around here? I dont think I’ve ever seen it. ✌️)looks up from playing DeltaLosing what now?This is why I want to buy the games instead of using the subscription service.I had a ton of VC games on my Wii and it eventually broke @-wc- It is against the rules to do so. But mostly it doesn’t seem to be enforced with draconian strictness. I think people posting links to things is mostly what is frowned upon.Sports games are always riddled with license issues. Especially older games.
Look at Mike Tyson’s Punch-OutOh cool, we can now lose games on NSO. -_-@Ultimapunchroger that, and understandably so 👍 cheers@Synplexliterally the only licensing problem for Mike Tyson’s Punchout was the name Mike Tyson 😂 you aren’t wrong but I thought it was a funny example. ✌️Give me a list of 3rd party NSO games to play which have been out the longest and worth playing asap!@MontyCircus I know Stories From Sol got a physical release confirmed somewhere, I’m pretty sure it’s in the EU because that’s where the studio is located but you could always import it.@YosherNo, it won’t. Majority don’t really care about this one Soccer game getting delisted…most probably never heard of it. If it was one of Nintendo’s games getting delisted, then that may cause uproar@HistoricKombat It’s not about this game specifically getting delisted, it’s about a game at all being delisted.Nintendo’s own games are very much likely safe. But this does show that at least third party games are not. And this information could be enough for some people to no longer subscribe (if the NSO games were a big enough reason for them to subscribe) and just emulate everything elsewhere.It probably won’t be a huge number of people. It may just be a handful of them. Not nearly enough to really “harm” Nintendo at all, or make them do something about it. But I can absolutely see at least SOME people unsubscribing over this news.Again, not because of this game specifically being removed, but because of the news that games in general can possibly be removed, deleting official access to it indefinitely, and never knowing when any game in particular might be deleted in this manner.Besides, I can see one particular branch of Nintendo games being on this list of possible removals: Pokémon games. Because The Pokémon Company seems to love to keep people from having access to their games, especially the official mainline games that aren’t the current system’s games. Hence why there are none of those on NSO as of yet, and why they could potentially be removed if they ever get added.Will they be removed if they get added? Probably not. Is the possibility there? Quite likely yes. This fact alone could very well be enough for people.@WisestfoolI forgot Mario Picross was on NSO. I loved regular Picross on the original GameBoy.Don’t you just love a digital only dystopia?Note it leaves on March 28th, the last Friday of the financial year, suggesting some games may disappear, ie. licenses expire, around this time every year.@Ultimapunch What massive irony; that 3D Mario All-Stars, as close to a Virtual Console the Switch could get, was the one delisted, and Mario 64 still remains on NSO (for now. . . .)@-wc- sure, it wasn’t the strongest example but it was the only thing that popped into my head at the moment 😅 But they did more than just change the name. They had to remove Mike Tyson out completely as the final fight.@Knightrider1 Nintendo and Rare/Microsoft own Goldeneye 007 though- which is NOT the case with Super Soccer! Also, it’s only being delisted in some countries- not all of them! North America will still have it! Show CommentsLeave A CommentHold on there, you need to login to post a comment…Nintendo Highlights Four Brand New Games “Coming Soon” To SwitchMarch is going to be an exciting monthPoll: Will You Trade In Your Switch When Switch 2 Arrives?Switch it upStunning New Physical Edition Of Stardew Valley Is Now Available At FangamerIncludes comic, poster, art cards, and moreReview: Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection (Switch) – A Comprehensive Round-Up With A Few Real WinnersDuels in the crownNintendo Switch Online Announces Removal Of Super Famicom TitleGoodbye, Super SoccerGame ProfileTitle:Super SoccerSystem:Super NintendoPublisher:Human EntertainmentDeveloper:Human EntertainmentGenre:SportsPlayers:2Release Date:Super NintendoNintendo Switch Online (Subscription)Series:Sport, Football, Soccer, Nintendo Switch OnlineWikipedia:en.wikipedia.orgWhere to buy:Buy on eBay
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