Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end
pretendo.network
pretendo.network
Online services for earlier consoles like the Wii were more basic, and IIRC in some cases were developed and maintained by third parties, not Nintendo themselves? I understand wanting to get rid of that overhead especially if it wasn’t driving incremental revenue.
But now the Switch is more intimately tied to online services for buying games and add ons. The most customer-friendly approach would be to keep backend services running indefinitely. Basically consider your backend to be a platform like Windows or macOS and maintain and evolve it indefinitely, keeping older consoles alive as long as possible (and continuing the ongoing revenue stream from older consoles, even as it shrinks over time, to at least cover cost.)
It seems like they have to do something like this to support downloadable games, at least with the online shop. I wonder how they’ll handle it.
I read a rumor that the successor to the Switch is expected in 2024 or 2025. And we picked up a Switch a couple months ago and I chose to buy all games as digital download version. And I remember the backend for the Wii being shut down. So this has been on my mind recently.
You can't count on these companies to care about the consumer past the initial purchase. If you can jailbreak your console there are plenty of sites that preserve the released games that you can install after the online services are shut down.
For instance we actively dissuade people from taking photos during foreign trips or at the restaurant because they're supposed to be enjoying the experience, instead of viewing it trough a viewfinder.
We haven't reached a point yet where people are arguing they should have a copy of the tiramisu recipe and backup access to the kitchen in case the restaurant shuts down and they can't have their tiramisu anymore.
In some way, I wonder if most online games nowadays aren't closer to a tiramisu experience than something we are supposed to own. Fortnite for instance would be fundamentally about the experience of interacting with other players, the seasons system etc. and "owning" the game offline would be completely different.
I still see RPGs types of games and fully offline playable games as something that should be priced differently and have a more standard ownership model. Things like Super Mario Maker mentionned in the article would be sitting in the middle. Also preservation efforts should continue on an academic and cultural standpoint, to at least leave some trail of what was happening in the gaming world during our time.
Now to get back to the tiramisu part, I think what makes it delicious in some restaurant is either obfuscated (e.g. the chef has a specific way to process some of the steps, or use some benign undisclosed ingredient). Or it's based on a specific ingredient that won't be available to anyone seeking it. For instance the coffee they use come from the chef's own farm, or they grind it a specific way that only works with their machinery as they haven't gone public about it.
In many ways I think the generic recipe of most games is widely available: if we gave you a team and a few billion dollars, you could probably make a generic Fortnite clone in less than a year. But would it be as good as what Epic's team is providing right now ? probably not ? (no offence)
So, while of course there are many widely known and available tiramisu recipes, a specific recipe from a specific restaurant is not necessarily so. Just in passing, this is something that many people who wish for an end to software copyright forget: the alternative to copyright is not at all free public software, it is trade secret Linux "recipes".
I can dump the carts somehow and play the games legally using an emulator if/when they pull the plug on it.
Games are routinely coming out with ~60-100GB day-one updates.
There is no reason the entire game couldn't be on the disk and working as intended.
The reason there is such a large day one update is simply that games are released unfinished and/or untested. This isn't the fault of the medium. This is a systemic video game industry problem.
Technically being able to contain the content and actually being able to boot the game from the disc (after transferring to the console hard drive) are two separate things. Even without counting Day 1/Day 0 patches. Some games refuse to run without downloading additional content that isn’t on the disc, others require talking to a server even if you’ve just downloaded the latest updates, others. A patch to fix bugs and add content is one thing, refusing to play entirely is another.
They dropped the original Xbox like a box of bricks. They shut down those old servers quite rapidly. With the Xbox 360 however, they will stop the ability to buy games on an original Xbox 360 next year. That's a long era of support!
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/08/17/xbox-360-store-will-c...
I'm fairly convinced new credit card standards are probably what is closing down the 360 store. They're only closing down the ability to buy things. Nintendo is also shutting down the Wii U and 3DS around the same time and Sony has already stopped allowing credit cards on a PS3.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/6/22713526/sony-ps3-vita-bu...
But getting back to Microsoft, the Xbox One and the Series consoles are running the same store. The OS is for all intents and purposes exactly the same. Any 360 game that has been migrated to the new One/Series store through backwards compatibility is staying purchasable past the closure of the 360 store.
When the next round of closures comes, Microsoft won't close down a store, they'll prevent the Xbox One from accessing the store. I hope with all my might that Nintendo does the same; that the Switch OS remains their software platform and that they close access to their store, not shut it down.
Others (cough google cough) are on the other end of that spectrum. I would imagine Nintendo is somewhere in the middle.
That said, i still grabbed Digital copies of games. Plan is i can put multiple switches on an account and when they are traveling (ie: not connected) my kids can play games without having to cop 2 copies of every game.
Still need to get the second switch online to test this premise though.
At least that is the plan.
* Backwards compatibility is maintained
* The company doesn't exit the console business and shut down their servers.
I'm pretty regularly playing 20+ year old games, and plan on playing them for the next 40 years. On this timescale I have serious doubts about the stability of online first platforms.
I would take 18 total years online support for the Switch. It's been out for 6 so far, so even if I "only" got 12 years out of my unit (I just bought one recently) that would be pretty good...
...but not excellent. I bought a Wii in 2008 and after a long time in storage I pulled it out again a few years ago. Since then it's been used at least once every two weeks and mostly weekly. It's 15 years old and everything including the game CDs have held up surprisingly well.
Will I want to use my Switch and the digital games I purchased, in 15 years? Can't rule it out based on past history.
Wikipedia says >132 million Switch units have shipped, and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom just launched 6 months ago. Adding it all up, shutting down the Switch backend services in even 4 or 5 years seems insane at best.
Fan patches and system modifications will keep things running, but I assume that the population that’s both willing and able to apply them will be sharply limited.
Which I’m fine with, but it’s not like Valve is magical somehow. If your machine isn’t still getting Chromium builds they can’t build Steam for it, you still need to buy new hardware. And the game consoles (less) often let you play old games on new hardware.
I actually haven't encountered a single game that doesn't work on Linux that's available on steam. I'm sure they exist, but I personally haven't hit any.
My biggest annoyance was when I tried to play Diablo 4 and had to mess about with the Blizzard launcher. Really made me appreciate how fool proof Linux gaming has become with Steam nowadays.
A few of those have been updated by the publisher to ship with DDrawCompat, nglide or dgvoodoo, but at large they require some tinkering to get them in a running state.
Excluding those who will never, ever work again due to copy protection systems (e.g., all those Games for Windows Live that never received a patch, those EA games still shipping with Securom) of all my games, circa 15-20% of them crash on boot. Nearly all of them are pre-Dx8 games, which basically run correctly only running on a recently unsupported configuration by steam, Windows 7 32bit.
Windows 10 runs on anything that will emit a clock signal, and Windows 11 can be forced onto hardware it doesn't officially like.
I don't like Windows 7 support being dropped either, in large part because the dropping comes due to CEF used by Steam, but it's not like the hardware concerned becomes useless with no way out.
It runs extremely poorly on low power hardware. Poorly enough that I consider it unusable. Windows 7 ran fine on the same hardware previously.
Games built for Windows 95 not being playable because your hardware can’t efficiently run Windows 10 is a relevant discussion.
So not exactly perfect either as far as backward compatibility is concerned.
[1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4784-4F2B-1321-80...
Basically you can't use it without another device to check your mail/texts.
It's been going on for at least 2 months.
It's not gaming if it has IAPs. I've given up on even reading about mobile "games" when they all went IAP. I'm too poor to afford that.
Obligatory IANAL.
If Valve is offering supplemental support on top of what the developer is offering (eg: running Windows games on the Steam Deck via Proton), then its Valve’s obligation to keep things running, as the developer has never committed to keeping things running outside their supported platforms. That said, additional support from the developer (eg: Microsoft/343i for Halo, Respawn for Apex Legends) to get games running on other platforms is always appreciated.
Why wouldn't they work well? Every time backward compatibility is mentionned, Microsoft Windows is praised as the best example of it and people brag they can still run everything they used to run in 1995.
Open source projects such as dgVoodoo offer a solution to run old games, by re-implementing old DirectX and Glide on top of current DirectX [1], similar to how Wine runs DX games on Linux on top of OpenGL or Vulkan.
That aside, the only other old game API that I can think of that's gone for good is DirectPlay, which generally means no multiplayer for games that depend on it as the only option, but otherwise doesn't affect them.
And I said "most", not "all".
However they had a terrific track record on backcompat for years in the handheld space. GB -> GBC -> GBA -> DS -> 3DS, every one supporting at least one generation back's physical media. Nintendo understands the value of the Switch library and I think would be very cautious to release successor hardware that didn't play the existing titles.
I really hope so. The switch has such a great library, it would be an absolute shame if they abandoned it all. From the rumors I've heard they're sticking to a similar platform for the next console so hopefully backwards compatibility is reasonably likely.
The deck is similarly sized, of higher quality and power, more versatile, and just as easy to use. Plus the backbone of the deck is a long-lived downloadable game service that still has my games from over a decade ago. And of course, it's also an incredible emulation machine and a full Linux desktop.
The issue was that the Wii was basically just a GameCube++ in terms of architecture, and no one would have expected a digital storefront on a platform where all the software boots bare metal.
The NAND was only 512 MB, but it was easily expanded with a memory card for downloads. The security model worked somewhat well, with jailbroken consumers having to keep an eye out for Nintendo's retaliation during the active part of the console's life. While it didn't have a hypervisor (well, it sort of did - if you squint just right, the ARM processor was a hardware bus access arbitrator that would lock you out if you were accessing things you weren't privileged enough to access), it definitely did have an OS - multiple concurrently installed copies, in fact.
IMO, there is nothing miraculous about Wii's ability to support paid digital games. We don't find it miraculous when a hypervisor-less PC can run games purchased off Steam that were downloaded to an external USB drive. Why should we think it's miraculous when a games console does something nearly identical?
None of this is necessarily indefensible, but it paints a very unclear picture for what to expect going forward. The hard copies of the deluxe ports will presumably always be playable on Switch hardware, but will the next generation be able to use them? Similarly, one would hope that digital-only games that are fully offline after installing like the Mario bundle would be playable on consoles they already are installed on indefinitely, but will the store shut down and make it impossible to download again on a different device if your hardware dies? Will digital purchases made for the Switch ever be available without having to purchase again on the next generation console?
As for the subscription-only online games, I don't think there's much reason to believe that anything at all will transfer over. Even being able to transfer saved games from them to a new generation console would be more than I'd expect.
If I buy a game I should be able to launch it and redownload it. If the above is not feasible then strip the drm at the consoles end of life and allow me to download my library and launch it indefinitely until bitrot destroys it. Absurd that we have this current system of “purchase digitally and play until the servers are shut off, which is a timeframe that is unclear”
unfortunately, this is not the right for which you paid, despite the fact that it is what people believe when they click purchase.
That's why i condone piracy. It enables preservation, regardless of the choice of the copyright owner.
That's why i would always want to make an offline backup of whatever i buy. It's hard to do sometimes, and the onus being on me to do it is a failing of the consumer protection laws that did not evolve with digital purchases.
Unfortunately consumers don’t seem to agree and have no problem shelling out billions of dollars for these things. The current console generation is clearly pushing hard to shift things entirely to digital; it is actually becoming difficult to purchase physical copies of games. The recent yakuza game didn’t get a physical release in the USA and I had to import a copy from play-Asia. It works fine on my us ps5 but they were clear as it’s a region 3 release any future patches/dlc/psn support may not work correctly unless I create a region 3 psn account specifically for that game. Quite a headache. Although funny enough the game itself was $10 cheaper so even with tax and shipping it worked out to be the same as if I had bought it on psn.
Ideally it would be possible to archive the games (like ROMs or what the Internet Archive does for websites and files) and also the server / database so that the games could be playable in the future, but I doubt that Nintendo or any larger publisher would do that.
I wonder if there's a solution for this in the short term or if these games and their data would be lost forever.
this or they lose the copyright.
The more functionality there is on the server (common for anti-piracy/cheating) the less likely that is to happen. I’d like to see that change, reflecting that the idea behind things like the DMCS preservation exceptions and copyright expiring is contributing to the public commons and that’s different for running code than earlier forms of media.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/victory-users-libraria...
https://copyright.gov/1201/2015/fedreg-publicinspectionFR.pd...
Yes, you are really expected to reverse-engineer and decrypt everything yourself. DMCA 1201 is a really fucking stupid law.
I think an effective remedy for this kind of situation can't just be fiscal, we need requirements to publish adequate technical specifications and strong IP carveouts to make it likely to move the needle. Forcing companies to maintain continuous support is a non-starter. We should instead focus on enabling unofficial support from outside the companies, and remove legal threats from those who choose to do so
The idea is that the continuity requirements should not be onerous, given the revenue, say, less than 1% of it, "a good problem to have".
Publishing a reasonable spec would be a part of that.
If you’re going to go down this path, why wouldn’t you just require that the title needs to be purchasable on a primary market and usable on hardware/software that is currently supported in order for a copyright to be enforceable.
If I can’t purchase and enjoy a copyrighted work legally, the copyright is unenforceable.
In response to sibling comments, I don’t know why you’d do a carve out for small and indie game studios. If you’re not actively offering your copyrighted content for sale in a primary market, it shouldn’t matter whether you are a big studio are a small studio.
Let society take over archiving and sharing your work.
All that is to say I think it’s slightly more complex than what can be contained in a single HN comment but agree with you in principle.
If artists truly want their performance to be "in the moment" with no way for anyone else to see it, they can arrange for private performances where the audience can be bound by a contract above and beyond basic copyright; but I don't think we should be optimizing for this case.
I am attempting to say a person shouldn’t be able to record someone else’s performance and distribute it for profit or post it on a streaming service and profit from the ads.
> If I can’t purchase and enjoy a copyrighted work legally, the copyright is unenforceable.
That’s not true in the United States, and if it were you’d still have the problem this thread is discussing where you need the servers (or DRM systems, etc.), which is why I’d like to change the incentives so it’s cheaper to release things you no longer intend to use even if they weren’t directly distributed to users.
The indie carve out reflects that there is some real cost here (packaging things up, vetting the rights for a release, etc.) If you have an old game which never went big, you don’t want a solo developer getting hit with a bill they can’t afford because they didn’t back up everything well or life happened and some planned work took longer than they thought it would. Again, remember this proposal is for a legal mechanism to compel action and you want to think about how it could impact people with the least resources.
The government is well-configured to use copyright as a stick, too. Literally the only reason why copyright - an artificially imposed monopoly - works at all is because the government enforces it, and so it gets to set the terms for eligibility. The legal mechanism here would be a new law, same as your tax proposal, so I fail to see the difference.
As far as needing servers to continue running - the community is generally quite capable of doing that so long as there are no legal roadblocks to it like DMCA and CFAA. It is likely to provide a better experience too, compared to what would essentially be compelled support from the original developer, which is virtually guaranteed to be the least they can get away with to legally dodge the tax - e.g. spinning up one underpowered server that can only serve very few users at a time.
It is also unclear how such compelled services would interact with game updates. Is the server required to support all past versions of the game going all the way back to the original release? For competitive multiplayer games especially this may not feasible for good reasons. OTOH if you only require that they support the most recent update, this opens the possibility of the developer simply shipping an "update" that disables as many features as they can get away with once the game is on life support - e.g. removing multiplayer entirely if possible, or at least making it as crippled as they can get away with; and then providing support only for that crippled version.
Japanese IP holders exercising IP rights solely in moral grounds in markets they have no intention or ability to enter had been a source of frustration to some. Requiring substantial economical involvement sure is one way to force it.
I hope one day there will be a precedent set for companies to open source the servers they are shutting down.
As the article points out, this whole system was basically a result of the infancy of online game services, especially for Nintendo. It's a quirky result of an architecture that is much less centralized than modern console game services.
If you ask me, it's very unlikely that Nintendo will ever shut down the Switch eShop, because I don't think the Switch eShop will be replaced when its successor launches. It will be much more like the PS4 to PS5 transition where your account information and digital library stays the same.
(By the way, the solution you are talking about is what the blog authors are working on)
And I think you’re right. If they have any sense, and it generally seems like Nintendo does, they’ll keep the Switch eshop running indefinitely. Hopefully they do the same with the other backend services supporting the Switch, but that is more questionable. They really should though.
What happens concretely if you start Super Mario Maker while the 3DS console is offline? Can't you play it on a plane?
For context, the Wii used GameSpy under-the-hood. You weren't necessarily required to use it (as evidenced by EA shipping their own system) but most developers did. The reason why Wii online was shut down was specifically because GameSpy got bought out and started massively increasing their server hosting costs.
Of course, that's a little different from the Rendez-Vous situation, because presumably Nintendo is hosting the servers and just put someone else's software on them. Still, it's strange that they built two different account systems - and I suspect part of the reason why they're shutting down the Wii U and 3DS systems is purely so that they don't have to support what sounds like a nightmare, anymore.
Here's to hoping they built the Switch's online somewhat sort of correctly...
Transferring your ACNH save was a nightmare before their cloud service came out, if I remember.
That being said, Nintendo has started using an in-house replacement system called "NPLN" in some of their more recent titles. Some examples include Splatoon 3 and Pokémon Scarlet/Violet. (They've shown no indication of converting older titles to the new system, however.)
I don’t know the Mii format but it can’t be large, and the only arbitrary input there is the name, I believe.
Nintendo themselves are pretty good at writing secure stuff; it’s usually libraries or 3rd party games which have been responsible for the software exploits in Nintendo software.
The original one was actually a name parsing bugs in the twilight princess(first party title) save file.
And now people use the letter bomb exploit which abuses a string parsing bug in the letter system of the wii.
I'd say Nintendo have a pretty bad history of writing secure format parsers.
Those examples are very old at this point. You may be surprised to learn that Nintendo have learned from these, and are much better at this than they used to be.
The Switch is only hackable via hardware; no software methods work, and the only one that did was caused by a hardware problem on Nvidia’s part.
The original Wii exploit was to use tweezers to short two circuits at a special time. The software that revealed led to the software exploits which are used today.
The Wii U was exploited by its backwards compatibility with the Wii.
If marcan wants to tell me I’m wrong, I’ll believe him, but until then I’m convinced that Nintendo is far better at this than they used to be.
Distributing games via physical copies is already a profit loss compared to distributing them via an online store, and distributing different cartridges per-game means even more supply issues for that specific game. Allowing players to do a one-time burn of the game they purchased to a blank cartridge would mean game companies could sell the game at full price digitally, make an extra sale on the cartridge, and gamers get the security of knowing that if servers were going to be shut down, they'd have the ability to burn the games they care about to physical media and be able to keep playing them. Win win for everyone.
Purchase a game console, why shouldn't the store remain functional indefinitely?
Yes, I get operating costs for your store front, but the standard should be, _if you are operating a market it should not be yours to control_.
Monopolies are bad in all forms, game stores should be operable by anyone, period.
And yes companies can protect themselves by disqualification of warranty for 3rd party stores, but that should be the consumer's choice, not some arbitrary CEOs decision.
We should buy your product because it offers something worth buying, not because you needed a subscription to bump your numbers...
If aspects of culture can be memory-holed because people aren't allowed to retain copies (and I mean popular shows and movies, books, music, not just games), the only winning move is not to play.
Abandonware should be open-sourced, copyrights should be capped at around a decade, and corporations should stop competing with each other to be the biggest asshole.
I don't really get why people willingly joined walled gardens like that.
Your garden might be wider, but there's still walls.
Also try creating a separate steam account for each game you buy. Then see how easy/hard it is to switch between steam accounts on the same computer.
If that's an actual issue for you. You can trick most games by just going offline on the computer where the game is already running in the moment you start it on the second machine. Some games are 'tricked' by starting the exe directly.
But the key realization here is that when we “buy” games these days we just rent them. If we aren’t happy with that then we should simply not take part in the transaction.
https://archive.org/details/super_mario_maker_courses_202105
I vote with my dollar. I vote against Nintendo.
I just had to refrain from a Steam purchase because I saw that it requires the Origin launcher, an EA account, and is always online. For a singleplayer game. Madness.
It only took a decade but now this stuff is just common practice and nobody cares about paying $100 for digital purchases that will be ripped away from them when some server is shut down in a few years.
Honestly, physical games are kind of a bust at this point too. Many games are shipped with incomplete versions of the game on the disc, and you're required to download some of, if not majority of the game when you insert it. Hell, some games are sold in physical cases but you open them up and instead of getting a disc/cartridge you get a piece of paper with a download code.
There’s sites like GOG that give DRM-free versions of games, and I like GOG a lot, but it’s still fundamentally a proprietary service that could shut its doors down tomorrow. I know that I personally do not have all my GOG games backed up, and I am one of the rare people that has enough disk space to actually do that, so I doubt I am weird here.
What happens if steam goes away?
The existence of drm removal tools does not make a product drm free, in the same way ms office isn't open source if you steal the source code.
If the dev does not do this, there is no steam DRM. lots of games dont use it, remember kenshi as an example.
https://play0ad.com/community/donate/
Until there is a proven revenue model to pay people to work on open source games there won’t be many.
It looks like those servers went offline in 2014, but it felt like we didn't get this service for very long.
We pretty much decided from that experience we'd never buy a console again.
The only logical reason I can think of to shut these services down is to try to drive people towards new kit.
And beyond that, there's uptime monitoring. Security alerts. Logs to be read.
Bandwidth and bare metal costs are trivial, compared to labour to keep such things operational.
I wouldn't be surprised if one of two things happened. Some piece is now obsolete, and that requires a large amount of work to upgrade. Maybe a partial code rewrite.
Or someone key left. And training isn't seen as worth the effort, when #1 is close on the horizon.
Upgrades are (usually) complete poison.
But ultimately, your last sentence points out the most important reason - the companies want gamers to spend time and money on new games.