Nintendo’s DSi XL launches in North America tomorrow, but if you plan on picking one up, here’s a note of warning: If you also own a DSi, any DSiWare games you bought for it won’t transfer to your new DSi XL — you’ll have to re-purchase them on the XL in order to play them on it.
A Nintendo spokesperson confirmed this limitation to Kotaku, saying that although they’re “looking into that specific topic” it terms of finding a workaround, they “don’t have anything to announce at this time.” The problem essentially stems from the fact that Nintendo doesn’t have any kind of persistent account that can be transferred or logged into on various hardware, meaning there’s no way a gamer’s new DSi XL could “know” whether they’ve already purchased any DSiWare games.
Hopefully Nintendo will indeed figure out a fix to this limitation eventually, but for now the result is they’re forcing games to purchase games twice to be able to play them on their new handheld — obviously not an ideal situation for consumers. And even though they’ve already announced it’ll be backwards compatible with cartridge-based DS games, you have to wonder — will the same be true with DSiWare games when the Nintendo 3DS releases as well?