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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

Until the next bean counter at a different game company entirely decides an online product burns too much to be profitable. Or maybe the store for all those digital goods isn’t quite making its quarterly targets.

Right now, I can head down to my basement, jack two AAs into my Game Boy, and play Pokémon Red, a 28 year-old game. I have zero confidence that will be possible with any of today’s games in 28 years.

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You can play Pokémon Red but not save your game, because the batteries inside the game cartridge are dead.

Yeah but all it takes is a soldering iron, a Philips head, and 2 minutes to put a new one in.

Quite different to a modern game where what’s on the physical cartridge/disc may not even be playable without a day one patch from a long-decommissioned server.

My original game saves are actually still there, miraculously.

Why wouldn't I be able to boot up my Switch game carts 28yrs from now?

Because a lot of Switch games require downloading the finished game to be playable. See which here: https://www.doesitplay.org/switchCartsRevisions

Thanks!

My switch is (and will remain) offline. I wasn't aware some games may not play - even some first-party games like super mario 3d allstars needs updating, according to this.

That link does not say the update is required to play all-stars.

That's an important point for the games it affects but there's only eight carts there that require an update to play.

Any number is too many, I agree.

This seems a bit misleading, since for many of these games they work fine without downloading the updates. If you don't connect Super Mario Bros Wonder or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to the internet, then version 1.0 is a perfectly playable, full version of the game.

And from my experience, I can just refuse the update every time. Heck, from a speedrunning perspective it's probably better not to update them, since the updates patch out a bunch of tech that makes them more fun to mess around with (easy item dupes in Tears of the Kingdom, easy out of bounds in Mario Wonder).

In a month from now Splatoon 1 will basically be unplayable on an original unhacked Wii U. Sure you can do the single player story mode, but the main multiplayer mode is going to be gone by then unless you use Pretendo. I think the Switch is actually in a better situation because it has paid online so as long as enough people pay for online for Nintendo to keep up the budget for server maintenance it could potentially last decades while Nintendo has an incentive to cut online for their older platforms that they are basically paying to keep up for free.

> so as long as enough people pay for online

This payment only funds the console's matchmaking services. The cost of maintaining dedicated servers falls on the devs for third party games, and presumably a different budget for first party ones. So the, admittedly few, games with dedicated servers (e.g. Splatoon 1) can't survive in this payment model either.

Splatoon 1 doesn't have dedicated servers, the matchmaking is done on a server but the game itself runs peer-to-peer

You're right, my bad: a quick search lead me to think that it had some server dependency that had been shut down prematurely, before the console's own online services.

I'm guessing the matchmaking is part of the Wii U's shared online services and not game-specific.

This does not affect any of my offline games, just as GP could boot up Pokémon Red.

In order to get Celebi legitimately in the Japanese version of Crystal, you have to connect your GBC to a phone and use an online service that hasn’t worked for decades. In the VC version they patched the game so that you can get it with a different method but the physical GBC game does not have all of the features it used to once upon a time.

That's an interesting note but sounds like an optional bonus, not something that prevents you playing the game?

It doesn’t but I would point out that older games are not immune to this issue

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