Archive link: https://archive.ph/aWo6a
In early April 2024, online play and other functionality that uses online communication will end for Nintendo 3DS* and Wii U software. This also includes online co-operative play, internet rankings, and data distribution.
We will announce a specific end date and time at a later date.
Please note that if an event occurs that would make it difficult to continue online services for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U software, we may have to discontinue services earlier than planned.
- This includes software exclusive to New Nintendo 3DS
They don’t have to be. 30 year old PC games have their server software bundled with the game; the ephemeral aspect of current online services is entirely artificial.
And it’s incentivized by the people buying into it. If people collectively woke up and started asking questions, this wouldn’t be an issue.
Instead, we buy into them and then try to force them to open up through legislation.
Imagine if cars were really unsafe. Would you say, “we shouldn’t legislate car safety, we should all just wake up and start buying safer cars!”
Why not just turn to services that actually value preservation, instead of sticking with those that don’t?
This question, I can’t deal with it. It just kills a bit more of hope for the future that people are thinking like this.
First of all it’s trivial to copy and distribute digital media. There’s no great obstacle that impedes players to run games effectively indefinitely, it’s a matter of unwillingness. The game is not ephemeral, company support is ephemeral.
Don’t you like the games that you play today? Do you really think nobody will want to play them in the future?
There are people running Quake 3 Arena servers still today. That’s a game from 1999. That’s not even bringing up how people figured out how to run even older couch multiplayer games online.
Can you imagine if that was said out of any other medium? “Why not just acknowledge that books are ephemeral?” That would be an outrageous notion and it would be regarded as a massive failure of society towards culture. Yet we have a whole new medium that would be trivial to preserve if not for deliberate obstacles put in the way, and there are people treating it as a lost cause. It boggles my mind!
If you think it’s not a lost cause, then tell us what we can do!
How do we convince politicians to turn this into a law? The same politicians that don’t understand technology and still think that FPS games breed terrorists. Once it’s a law, how do we make sure it’s enforced worldwide?
Do not lump me in with the consumers that created this future. I am already preserving what I can. I am the weird kid in the corner who advocates for DRM-free games on GOG and gets called crazy for having a 16TB hard drive full of offline backup installers. I legally back up what I can, and obtain what I can’t. I play Warframe and other live service games knowing well that they’ll be gone one day, unless someone manages to hack together a private server. I can’t help but still enjoy some of them.
Being a hoarder and advocating for game preservation in front of average Joes is thankless and exhausting. I can’t help but stare reality in the face. You seem to know the situation a lot better than me, so tell me, what else should I be doing?
so tell me, what else should I be doing?
Mindset. In a way the defeatism is what allows it to happen as everybody else begins to feel the same way.
In other words, stay optimistic and speak positively towards your hopes. It’s true that the sad reality is that many people don’t care, but as long as we continue to let corps get away with it and not speak out about our passion for this then the chances of it actually happening dwindle more and more.
Warframe is popular as hell. It seems likely a game like that will continue. Planetside 2 as well.
A game like nexons Ghost in the Shell hero shooter, by the book but fun as hell, that game seems like it would be truly gone forever sadly. Except even the likes of Nexon’s rehashing of games gets private server emulation treatments!
The thing about our work is that we are quite literally going against the massive corporations so a lot of these projects either stay low key or risk getting shut down.
So yeah, it’s true that not everyone feels how we do. That doesn’t change the fact that if we stop talking about it and doing what we can the corps get exactly what they want and the efforts fade away forever. I think another good example is the ElDewrito Halo 3 rewrite which was effectively Halo PC until MCC finally released. The likelihood of MCC coming to PC was really high already but with all the reception it got over the years I really feel like ElDewrito pushed MCC to fruition sooner
I’m differentiating between products like Pokemon and services like Nintendo running servers that let you trade Pokemon.
Both should ideally be preserved of course, but today’s reality is that it’s much less feasible with the aforementioned services.
How can we change that?
