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Announcement of Discontinuation of Online Services for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U software
(en-americas-support.nintendo.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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There really should be a law requiring companies which provide online services to be required to release self-hosted server software once they discontinue the provision of the service.
Why though? Why not just acknowledge that these services are ephemeral?
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!”
Okay, you've got a point there.
This requires no imagination, but the analogy falls apart when you realize the only way to make them safer is to use them less.
When was the last time Mario Maker killed a man?
To be fair, cars having safety measures now are the reason why poor people can't afford them anymore though.
You can buy a brand new Dacia Sandero for 12000€, hardly expensive for a car.
A few reasons - preservation is one of them
Why not just turn to services that actually value preservation, instead of sticking with those that don't?
When books are published in the US, they’re required to submit a copy to the library of congress for preservation purposes.
It shouldn’t be left to corporations to decide whether or not the cultural artifacts they own are worth preserving or not.
Such as?
These days I certainly do, but it would be nice if we didn't just have an entire dark age of video games lost to time as well.
We don't choose what we value.
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?
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
Shin Megami Tensei Imagine online is still going thanks to release of the source. Legends.
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?
Then what do we do with these games? How do we discourage live service games?
Are you boycotting them?
More effort by whom? And how do we incentivize it?
You didn't answer my first question, and misunderstood the second.
Who do you expect to do the preserving? And how will you get them to do it?
I can't get to my point if you keep skirting around it.
How will you get profit-driven studios to care about preservation?
Well, you're here seemingly not realizing why studios don't give a shit about preservation. As we can observe in the real world, the branding opportunities and PR are not worth it to them 99% of the time.
Satellaview games are a prime example! So much lost content!
Because they shouldn't be...
I am having the fun of my life still playing DS games online, especially Metroid Prime Hunters and Jump Ultimate Stars.
That's not what the person you're replying to suggested though. They suggested that companies should release self-hostable server software when they discontinue providing the service themselves. In the age of containerized software this wouldn't even be all that difficult in many cases
I didn’t say it had to be open source. Copyright is irrelevant as far as this topic is concerned - compiling code into binary is transformative. The only thing that matters here is patent law, and it seems easy enough to just make a law that allows non-profit infringement of patents for this explicit purpose. I don’t think there’s any legal roadblocks to releasing server software.
I didn’t say they should keep the servers up forever, I agree that’s unreasonable. But it isn’t unreasonable to require that they release the software necessary for hosting the servers so that the fans/community can host servers if they so choose.
Seriously this needs to be addressed! Gran Turismo Sport is shutting down in january after, what? 4 years? Insane