The reason for my question: I don't want to own obsolete hardware in 10 years. Lately most games seem to depend on a "phone home" feature, which is not really an issue for my pc because it is always connected, but a console is something I want to play always and everywhere.

I already did some searching and found that games can be played offline fine (most of them, some exceptions are there like Multiplayer and Mortal Kombat), but:

There is something like the paid Nintendo Online Account. I am not planning on having a paid account. How much of the system depends on the account?
Can I have progression in a game (let's say: one of the Zelda franchise) and will my Wife and Kids all have their own progression, without having to pay for X accounts?
People who own a Switch, let's take this to extremes, do you feel like in 20 years from now you can still do the same things on your hardware as you can do now? (No multiplayer is fine)

Also, feel free to rant about "paying is not owning", the state of the gaming industry is horrible.

edit: Thank you all for the comments! I don't post a lot, so it was kinda overwhelming :)

For clarity:

I meant I want to "buy for life" (not really "life", but, if the hardware survives you can play on pre-internet consoles forever - you can even buy more games if you can find them)
I want to buy a physical copy of the games, not download them

I've decided to go with the Nintendo DS for now (I have a DSi - this week I bought a couple of games, 2nd hand). Reasons:

I already had it
Joycons on switch. Multiple people mentioned having problems with them. I don't count on being able to buy them new in 10 years, meaning they will have to last.

Again: thank you all for the useful input!

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[–] CorrodedCranium@leminal.space 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Well said the only thing I'd add is the 3DS line can play original DS games just fine. I would go that route rather than purchase something like a DS Lite with a flashcart.

It can also emulate up to PSX relatively well and I believe there's a somewhat decent homebrew scene. Not to the Vita's level but I think there's a decent amount of homebrew applications and custom themes.

[–] graymess@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

The "new" 3DS especially is an improvement on the original when it comes to emulation. And yeah, just last week someone ported Moonlight for it, which works surprisingly well for a device that only has a 2.4GHz WiFi card.

[–] zarenki@lemmy.ml 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I never liked to play DS games on 3DS because of the blurry screen: DS games run at a 256x192 resolution while the 3DS screens stretch that out to 320x240. Non integer factor scaling at such low resolutions is incredibly noticeable.

DSi (and XL) similarly can be softmodded with nothing but an SD card, though using a DS Lite instead with a flashcart can enable GBA-Slot features in certain DS games including Pokemon.

[–] MomoTimeToDie@sh.itjust.works 7 points 9 months ago

I don't remember the buttons to hold, but when you boot a ds game on 3ds, and hold the right buttons, it boots pixel-perfect on a smaller segment of the 3ds screen such that it's the same exact resolution as a ds screen