Hacker News Reader

Comment by daydream | Hacker News Reader

I wonder long will the backend infra supporting the Switch will last. Especially now that they’re selling download-only versions of the games.

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.

View on HN

Look at the one company who owns a vibrant operating system: Microsoft.

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.

Looks like the Xbox 360 will get more than 18 years of online store support. That's a really long time considering it launched in 2005.

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.

I got my original NES over 30 years ago. I had to swap a couple capacitors but still hook it up occasionally and show the kids games like Duck Hunt(required an old tv as well) and Tetris and Blaster Master. These digital games that suddenly stop working simply due to no server support is a hard pill to swallow. At that point I really think companies should be forced to release source code and keys and allow anyone who wants to offer support a chance to run the games.

The transition to not owning my own games sealed my decision to stop buying them. To me, it is insane to allow a company to determine how long I get to enjoy my purchase. More gamers need to take a stand.

Effectively Xbox 360 can have a human lifetime's worth of support because they have a jailbreak. I worry about the subsequent xbox consoles. They haven't been cracked right? They are the ones with a real ticking clock unless someone finally gets to cracking it.

I still have an Xbox 360, and as I'm not a regular gamer it's still my go-to. We maybe bought in in '06-'08. if they would shut down only services (and I could still play offline), that's totally ok for me. 15 years for a console is a long time.

Nothing approached the Kinect, Just Dance of that era just owns.

Not if you’re black

WiiU and 3DS eShops are already closed: https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/... but to your point, you can still download owned games and DLC "for the foreseeable future", just purchases have been removed. You still have the option currently to migrate any leftover funds to a newer Nintendo account.

I would argue Microsoft is one of the better ones with respect to backports and longer term support.

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.

You can only share games between accounts on your "home" switch.

Yeah. It’s gonna be two switches on a single account.

An account can only have one "primary" Switch, which is the only one that will play games without an online ownership check. Secondary switches need to be online to play games.

So you toss the “primary” in airplane mode and let the secondary check in to pass drm via hotspot when the kids are in the car.

At least that is the plan.

I think this approach is fine as long as

* 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.

A key detail here is that Xbox 360 online games were and are playable (as long as their individual servers are still running), while this network shutdown will disable any ability to play unmodified 3DS or WiiU games.

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.

It's kind of crazy how Nintendo has basically thrown out their entire service for consoles multiple times and started from scratch now. Can you imagine if Xbox Live or the PSN were thrown out and replaced with an incompatible new service after a single generation of use, let alone multiple times? Even ignoring the user experience, it feels like a massive waste of engineering work, with the benefit being...not having to spend as much effort implementing the service, or recruiting the proper talent to make it good enough to last? It honestly seems like they just didn't seen a compelling reason for previous generations, which is an unfortunate lack of foresight, but I really hope they've figured it out for the Switch and won't do it again.

Lack of support for 3DS and (probably) switch means I am moving over to the Steam Deck for my next console, probably early next year. Losing my entire switch library, basically forever, when the Switch 2 (or whatever they call it) is released seems like throwing good money after bad.

Nintendo has been getting greedy in recent years with the paid rereleases and HD ports.

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.

> 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.

Nintendo understands, Nintendo dont care.

Ignoring the disaster that was the Virtual Boy, they had a great run.

I'm not sure I bought a single physical release on switch since I bought the console in 2019

After getting my steam deck, I stopped buying Switch games. I even re-bought a couple of favorites (Slay the Spire, Monster Train) since I find myself using the switch less and less.

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 Wii was a bit of a special case for how incredibly janky it was to be trying to present a system shell without it being actually backed by a proper OS/hypervisor arrangement like the other platforms of its generation. That it was able to do paid digital games at all is kind of miraculous.

The Wii was designed with digital content delivery from the very start, from what I know.

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?

I dunno, miraculous in 1986 maybe, but in 2006?

Sure, it was reasonable for the time given that XBLA launched two years before the Wii.

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.

Do they port their old games to the new platform and then sell them?

Sometimes, but their strategy for this sort of thing is pretty inconsistent. You have stuff like the bundle of Super Mario 64/Super Mario Sunshine/Super Mario Galaxy which got ported pretty much as-is, warts and all (except for maybe the infamously misheard line in Super Mario 64 after beating Bowser), without even minor quality of life or graphical improvements, "deluxe" versions of Wii U games like Mario Kart 8 that didn't really get the time to shine due to the lackluster sales of that console, and then a sizeable but by no means exhaustive catalog of older games available only via subscription to their online service (which to its credit is very affordable at only $20/year) and aren't playable if you've been offline for more than a week.

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.

They did do some limited patches for 3D All-Stars to offer 16:9 resolution and patched the games to show Switch controls, but yeah... it all felt a bit lacking.

I bought physical copies of my Switch games for that exact reason.

I can dump the carts somehow and play the games legally using an emulator if/when they pull the plug on it.

This was my tactic as well. Seeing Xbox and Playstaion making console versions without optical drives has me worried about what the future may look like.

Optical drives have been useless for ages.

Games are routinely coming out with ~60-100GB day-one updates.

And optical drives can store that comfortably.

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.

(The following comment agrees with you, it is not intended as an argument against what you’re saying):

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.

These are also systemic issues in the industry. Every game should be able to run with the physical media without any connection to the internet.

Underrated comment

You can do the same with the eShop versions with the advantage you keep at lest some (if not all) of the post-launch patches for the game.

I can sort of understand ending life for allowing purchasing on the platform but why would you not create servers for the new consoles in a way that allows you to continue to serve downloads or at the very least whatever licensing necessary to launch the software to old hardware?

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”

> If I buy a game I should be able to launch it and redownload it.

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.

Agreed and why when I do purchase I only purchase physical. The digital downloads of games I have are either games that were so hilariously cheap on sale my moral compass didn’t matter (eg marked down to sub $5) or the free downloads I get from various promotions like the epic store. I don’t pirate video games but I don’t have any qualms with someone who does given the gross anti consumer practices the industry has been getting away with for ages

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.

"If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/

Valve has the perfect setup right now. Your desktop, laptop, or Deck can connect to Steam.

Steam will drop Windows7/8 support January 1, 2024[1], Vista and XP support got dropped a long time ago. Meanwhile they still sell Win95/98 games on the Steam store, which won't run well or at all on a Windows10/11.

So not exactly perfect either as far as backward compatibility is concerned.

[1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4784-4F2B-1321-80...

It depends on what you think of as perfect. Microsoft stopped supporting XP in like 2009 and Windows 8 in 2016. I run all my windows games on my Deck using proton. Games that ran on Windows 95 usually aren’t supported by the companies that made them decades ago but fans patch them. I got Vampire the Masquerade running on my Deck with little effort. So “perfect”? No. But functional? Absolutely.

Yeah, I played Descent (1995) yesterday on my deck without needing to do anything but invert the y-axis on the keypad (which is non-standard). Aside from that the game ran flawlessly. I’ve played a number of my childhood games on the deck and been incredibly impressed.

Wow I haven’t thought about Descent in a long time. I’m getting flashbacks. But yeah, I’m very impressed. I’m actually kind of proud they’re an American company too.

> Steam will drop Windows7/8 support January 1, 2024[1], Vista and XP support got dropped a long time ago. Meanwhile they still sell Win95/98 games on the Steam store, which won't run well or at all on a Windows10/11.

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.

This isn't really true beyond basic Windows GUI only programs. For example, most 2D Windows games made before the mid-2000s used a rendering API called DirectDraw. On Windows 8 and newer, DirectDraw goes through some sort of fallback rendering path and these games won't run at more than around 30 FPS with bad frame timing. The same thing happened with games that used 8-bit color with hardware palettes. Windows 8 and newer will only run at 32-bit color (the "run with 256 colors" compatibility setting was changed to just put a low color filter over the system graphics), so they are broken as well.

DirectDraw is an incredibly simple API (it doesn't even have 2D primitives - just blitting rectangles of pixels from one surface to another). AFAIK the fallback is basically doing that in software - since this is plenty fast these days - and letting the compositor handle the actual screen update. There's no reason why this would result in 30 FPS even on 20-year-old hardware, and indeed I regularly play a DirectDraw game from 1999 on Win11 without such issues.

They stopped that approach after the XP release as there was increased focus on security (more compatibility hacks = more surface area), users were able to update software online, and the sheer amount of software users could run. The old hacks for classic games are still in there though.

Well, there is overhead in testing additional windows versions, the libraries you use may use only deprecated SSL versions, and one needs to be careful not to connect them to the public internet because of unpatched security issues. And it does not allow the use of new platform features… iOS is worse: you can’t roll back iOS updates, so you need to keep one piece of hardware around for each version you test.

Microsoft has great backwards compatibility, but it isn't perfect. Those games might be coded to 1990s standards, e.g. using old graphics APIs that don't support modern GPUs.

Which ones? Apart from DOS games and windows 3.x which I would treat separatly the only graphics api I could think of was Glide for which there are modern wrappers like nglide.

Parts of DX5 and previous, such as the "retained mode", are missing from current versions of Windows entirely. Much of the remaining implementation is buggy and introduces render artifacts.

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.

[1]: https://github.com/dege-diosg/dgVoodoo2

dgVoodoo2 unfortunately is not open source, and its author has stopped regular development (keeping it at small maintenance fixes) some time ago. I can only hope that projects like WineD3D for windows[1] can make up for it in the long term, but we're one breaking Directx update away from going back to the start.

[1]https://fdossena.com/?p=wined3d/index.frag

Retained mode was deeply unpopular even back when it was supposed to be the flagship API, for good reasons (it was slow as hell), so the games that relied on it for support can literally be counted on both hands.

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.

People brag about a lot of things and windows compat is better than e.g. macOS but recent windows actually can't even run a good number of other MS software of the 95 era.

Is it a Valve problem, or a Microsoft one at that point? Nevertheless, you could still download your game and remove the thin DRM layer (tools available to do so), and then play them on your Windows<10 machines.

Valve problem. Selling merchandise you know/stated the customer can't use is negligent at best, malicious at worst.

Obligatory IANAL.

Valve offers a generous refund policy. If the game doesn't work on your system, refund it.

Seems like the obligation falls on developers and studios. It’s Capcom’s responsibility to keep Street Fighter X Tekken working because Capcom is the seller. Fortunately the community usually warns buyers about abandonware and you can always get a refund.

Also if you're playing on Linux a lot of those older games run perfectly through WINE, better than they run on modern Windows.

wine is rolled into proton.

Please excuse me while I become 'that guy', but Proton is a distribution of Wine with a bunch of patches and extra components like DXVK. The vast majority of proton is unmodified wine.

“[Proton] is a collection of software and libraries combined with a patched version of Wine[….]”. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not an expert in Proton or anything. Thanks for the input though.

It’s the obligation of the developer to make sure their game runs acceptably on supported platforms and on systems that meet the stated requirements.

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.

It would be ideal but it sounds like too much runaround for Valve.

They recently dropped support for MacOS 10.12. They're cutting it close since many Valve games only work on MacOS versions <= 10.13

Apple hasn’t support MacOS 10.12 for four years. That Steam still supports it is amazing to me.

Have you actually used steam lately? They did something to it on Mac that made it reset to the store page every time it loses focus and gains it back. Including when you try to read the code in your mail to be able to login, or when entering 3d secure codes for a purchase.

Basically you can't use it without another device to check your mail/texts.

It's been going on for at least 2 months.

I use Steam regularly, I don’t game on a Mac regularly. To be fair I don’t think most people use Macs for gaming. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. Apple has a tight grip on mobile gaming though, that’s a money maker for them.

> Apple has a tight grip on mobile gaming though, that’s a money maker for them.

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.

I don't play many mobile games but I tested The Battle of Polytopia when it was in beta and I still play it today. So it's not a complete loss. Android has solid emulation scene though.

Isn't that out of scope of the discussion? Valve doesn't provide the online game capabilities of title and cannot guarantee you will be able to play online to all sort of old titles whose published shut down the servers.

It’s within the scope of the discussion. Nintendo should centralize its games into a single universal platform like Steam. Now that Valve has a successful handheld console it’s even more relevant than ever.

I think most nintendo users are kids and most of the games are given as gift and purchased in cartridges anyway. And people want to be able to buy and sell their games second hand. The nintendo network really is about online gaming in the context of the nintendo DS products.

Kids and adults play Nintendo games. I played them as a kid and now I play them as an adult.

I am also an adult who played Zelda today.

And I said "most", not "all".

Yeah, I get what you’re saying but you’re incorrect. Kids 12 and young only make up 5% of their market. Most Switch users are 25 to 34.

Unless it’s a 32-bit Mac come January or a machine running windows < 8, in which case you’re screwed until you buy new hardware.

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.

My Deck just runs all those old windows games using proton. I mean, Windows subsystems runs Linux. You don’t even need VMs anymore. It’s not magic it’s just portability.

Steam Deck compatibility is spotty at best for DirectX-8 games and older.

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.

With a little fiddling most of those DirectX games work on the Deck. Again not perfect but absolutely functional. And never say never, fans find solutions to dead games all the time.

The majority of my steam collection is games that will not run on the steam deck or Linux. Out of 15 I have, only three works on. YMMV but doesn't look like 'all' these windows games unfortunately. May be more of an issue with the type of games I like, i.e. Civilisation, Age of Empires, etc.

Civilization and Age of Empires definitely work on Linux. Or atleast civ 5, AoE2:DE and AoE4 all work. I strongly suspect most of the other versions work as well.

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.

I have over three hundred games purchased on Steam, Windows games, and ROMs (GB to PS3) and I’ve only experienced one or two issues and it wasn’t the Deck’s fault. I play indie games on it all the time too. Now games are being made with the Deck in mind.

Maybe try adjusting the frame rate, wattage, and/or GPU frequency.

>in which case you’re screwed until you buy new hardware.

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.

>Windows 10 runs on anything that will emit a clock signal

It runs extremely poorly on low power hardware. Poorly enough that I consider it unusable. Windows 7 ran fine on the same hardware previously.

Seeing as we're talking about games, low power hardware isn't necessarily relevant.

We’re talking about games still being playable years later though, so there is an argument that older hardware is relevant (relatively speaking, anyway).

Games built for Windows 95 not being playable because your hardware can’t efficiently run Windows 10 is a relevant discussion.

This is why I don't buy a console that doesn't have a functional jailbreak/softmod.

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.

We've moved so far into the "you won't own anything" lane that it got me thinking back to how we deal with the rest of the world.

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.

I agree that we should think about whether or not it's better to let the past go and just enjoy experiences during their time rather than expecting them to be around forever, but I think your tiramisu example actually makes the opposite point - recipes like that are in the public domain and there will always be kitchens if you want to make one, whereas an online game server is a closed system that disappears if it's shut down. If companies would move services into the public domain when they don't want to run them any more, then the point becomes moot - if some community wants to setup their own tiramisu server to keep that cake alive, they should be allowed to.

While recipes are not copyrightable, they are not automatically public either. A restaurant can consider its recipes trade secrets, and sue any employee that discloses them and win. Even photographing the chef's recipe book or something as an outside person would be punishable via trade secret laws. Famously, Coca Cola's recipe is supposed to be a closely guarded secret, for example.

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".

This is a valid point, and I agree company data should be forced to become public under specific conditions.

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)

I disagree with you about restaurants, there aren’t really any secret ingredients etc… The main difference is skill, not many people have the skills to actually replicate a tiramisu as good as that specific famous shop. But someone who is really skilled absolutely can

I have actually found this problem. Some foods that I enjoyed aren't sold anymore because the company shut down and it made me sad. It made me reconsider whether it's worth trying new stuff from questionable companies, because even if I find something good it will probably disappear anyway.

I was about to buy the new Zelda game online, you are right though it’s hard to imagine how they can ever stop supporting it without everyone who bought a digital game coming to them with a bill. I wonder what the terms and conditions say?

I always buy physical copies for this exact reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com