Nintendo's online servers for Wii U and 3DS shut down today
en-americas-support.nintendo.com
en-americas-support.nintendo.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39754943 - The Super Mario Maker community faces its final boss (arstechnica.com)
Like can't you just host the site anonymously in Russia or something?
They can, but most of these fan projects are monetized in some way, either by simply asking for donations at every opportunity, or by straight up selling access to certain versions of the software via a Patreon subscription (as was the case with yuzu/citra) and they can't do that while remaining anonymous.
I think there should be some kind of compromise here where people are allowed to preserve older games (by rom dumping and archiving them) that have reached a certain age and enter the public domain. It's obviously a bad faith argument to say you should be able to play a pirated copy of a game on the day it came out. Nintendo should have an enforced monopoly on their ip for a fixed amount of time. But I should also be allowed to do whatever I want with my 3ds and the games I own for it after they end long term support. If I can't realistically purchase a game at retail from Nintendo, I should be allowed to access the game through other means.
Nintendo fan projects do exist, hell Dolphin has existed for decades now. If you saw the Yuzu situation play out and immediately lept to Yuzu's defense, hopefully Nintendo's request for discovery in that case disabused any notions that Yuzu is somehow "the good guys fighting against corporate tyranny."
We also have real world examples of piracy harming systems (Dreamcast, PlayStation Portable). Software is a console's lifeblood and it has to make sense as an investment. It's like fraud: you can never achieve 0.0% and must accept that reality, but you shouldn't let the situation go hog-wild either.
And yes, whether it's a small indie or Nintendo, if I lend my creative voice to a company I expect that company to protect what we make. This is why so many got pissed at WB disappearing Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme. Creatives are protective of their work and may factor that into employment considerations.
Edit- First demo released in 2011, DMCA was in 2016. As they say, timing is everything. Five years of undisturbed development isn't bad for de facto copyright infringement.
Citra was collateral damage.
In a sense we are very lucky these days these companies even extend support as long as they did for this particular case - in the future I think the window between "next gen version release" and the deprecation of the previous version will get smaller and smaller.
There is no financial incentive for them to keep the servers alive, so they don't. Thusly video game manufacturers should avoid making being online a necessity to play the game - but that's unlikely to get better either.
Not sure the solution, other than to provide "offline mode" for most games that really really do not need to be online other than to force players into some microtransaction/tracking hell.
But skip forward a decade — you cann’t run Facebook as it was in 2005; it’s gone forever. Same goes for any apps you installed on your iPhone; those are gone from the store and are never coming back.
the reason this feels particularly shitty, especially when compared to the reaction of microsoft shutting down halo servers -
halo was mostly a purely online game competitively, and single player could be played offline. There are a dizzying number of titles these days that cannot be played offline no matter how much you want to, or unless you come up with some ingenius hack.
Games that are purchased with the expectation that they won’t be around forever (like some sports franchise games that are discarded every year) are far less insulting to the consumer when support is yanked vs ones like Nintendo where you subconsciously just sort of expect to be able to play it forever.
It may seem bad for their bottom line to keep legacy server support (or enforce every game to support offline mode), but I think in the long run it builds brand loyalty and confidence. It’s a shame very few companies these days care or consider that.
This is the biggest issue and I wonder what can be done to fix this, short of government regulation.
I regularly play Gran Turismo 7. It should almost entirely be playable offline but any time they do server maintenance the entire game is shut down bar a small 'arcade' mode. Even worse: the saves are entirely online. So if you happen to be racing in 'normal' mode just as the server goes offline, it will allow you to finish the race but the progress will not save anywhere and is lost.
I own the physical disc for this game but what happens when those servers inevitably get shut down?
It seems like we are at a point where it's impossible to actually 'own' games anymore.
The market is failing to solve this problem, so our best shot is a regulatory fix. I know, I know, government solutions are always the wrong way, says HN. But how else can The People solve a problem that nobody is economically incentivized to solve?
Regulatory action is the only way that this will change, hopefully the EU puts their foot down soon. At least they seem willing to fight the software companies.
Nintendo’s Wii U and 3DS online services will shut down in April