[mattdotc]

I understand and agree with your stance on the sense of entitlement that some people have regarding software purchases, but I feel like you might have missed one of the finer points being made here. My response somewhat assumes that you either do not own recent Nintendo consoles, or at a minimum, are a very casual user of their platforms and are not aware of some of the shenanigans they've been up to due to negligence or incompetence in the digital space.

Purchases of their Virtual Console games for one console do not transfer across platforms. If you bought Mario 3 for Wii, you'll have to buy it again if you want to play it on the go for your 3DS. Furthermore, licenses for digital purchases on the 3DS (and maybe other consoles?) were tied to hardware IDs, resulting in a super-tedious license transfer process for anyone unlucky enough to need a repair or for those who had the nerve to voluntarily upgrade their system to one of Nintendo's hardware revisions.

So in some sense, they _do_ or, at least, reasonably _should_ have the infrastructure to manage digital purchases in a customer-friendly way, but instead settled for a system which forces people to re-purchase the same title for different platforms. Compare this to Sony and Microsoft, whose digital shops allow cross-platform purchases for many titles.

To add to all of this, Nintendo has a very confusing maze of different account systems for their different services and it is very tough to navigate which accounts serve which purpose. I have at least 3 accounts for Nintendo services at this point and it's still not clear to me what the deal is.

All of these factors combined make re-purchasing Zelda several times over a harder pill to swallow.