Under producing seem to be a movement Nintendo seems to be a tad too fond of. Just yesterday I was reading that Nintendo has ceased the production of the mini NES and SNES, so one they are sold out this holiday season, that's it.
The online service was fine while it was free, however as a paid service they can get stuffed. They are making people pay for a service when most of the games as P2P connections. One of their perks is NES online, which is almost unplayable even with high speeds if you happen to have latency. So for someone like me, living in Australia playing with someone from the US regardless of both having "fast internet" have a mess so lagging that getting pass a level in SMB3 is a frigging pain. And this is supposed to be a perk? it's like Nintendo still doesn't get that people connects with people all over the world, not just your neighborhood or state.
I had to laugh when you made the comparison of Nintendo's Voice chat to MSN service. How is it possible we don't have a proper friend list that lets us text and send invites to our friends to join our gaming sessions? How is it possible than in all this time I have basically only one game (Splatoon 2) using it for something else that just the voice chat?
the fact that, as you mentioned, the service from the competition launched almost twenty years ago is better than this is, frankly, embarrassing. Before the service was out I was trying to defend it, because I felt some complains were a bit petty but seeing that people got more disconnection problems, that you can't really play online NES games with others when frigging emulators have been able to do a better job of it for decades that they won't let you do cloud saves for some of the games (although discussing this with a friend their explanation kind of makes sense) and that they just seem to be doing the absolute minimal effort with it. Rather not bother including anything that will over complicate things even though they are expecting people to pay them. If hosting servers, as far as I understand though I could be wrong, are basically non-existent, what are we exactly paying them for? In the end our own internet is maintaining the online plays since the players connect to another directly to act as the hosting server.