Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

Close to 40(!) years later the original NES I grew up with still works and if you can find a cartridge and a TV that will play it, it will fire right up and work.

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.

View on HN

This is also unfortunate for software in general, not just games. If I want to relive the 90s, it’s possible to set up an old computer with Windows 98 and Office.

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.

But… this is the plan Stan :)

You’re on the first steps to enlightenment. All material things are impermanent and imperfect. Facebook in 2005 is never coming back. It was always just a digital mandala created by you and your friends.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_marks_of_existence

Indeed. It requires a shift in mental attitude from video games as things you can keep forever, to video games as events, like concerts. Enjoy it while it lasts, and when it is gone, be glad you got to experience it.

There's got to be some cosmic irony to using Buddhism principals of impermanence to help explain the next phase of post-WW2 consumer culture.

Rather than edit my parent I’d like to expand on this -

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.

> Thusly video game manufacturers should avoid making being online a necessity to play the game - but that's unlikely to get better either.

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.

> This is the biggest issue and I wonder what can be done to fix this, short of government regulation.

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?

Time to intercept and reverse engineer the traffic between your game and the servers, build up a local server and store your saves where you control them.

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.

With the periodic maintenance on replacing cartridge batteries being necessary otherwise bye bye save states.

The financial incentives just aren't there unfortuately for the game makers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com